Psyche's lamp; a revaluation of psychological principles as foundation of all thought

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PSYCHE'S LAMP

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

THE MAKING OF HUMANITY

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LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LIMITED

PSYCHE'S LAMP

A REVALUATION OF PYSCHOLOGICAL

PRINCIPLES AS FOUNDATION

OF ALL THOUGHT

ROBERT BRIFFAULT

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNW1N LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

First published in 1921

(All rights reserved)

Ed. /Psych.
Library

BF

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 7

CHAPTER

I. ACTION AND PURPOSE 23

II. ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION . . .37

III. FEELING AND COGNITION 56

IV. DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION . . . .82
V. ESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION . . .108

VI. THE ORGANISM AND FOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS . 125

VII. CONTROL AND FREEDOM 155

VIII. THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY . . .185

IX. CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT . . 203

X. THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY . . .217

POSTSCRIPT 237

PSYCHE'S LAMP

INTRODUCTION

Ax a time when so much in our estimates, conceptions,
opinions, calls for fundamental reconsideration we are
reminded that all thought and discussion, to whatever
aspect of confronting problems, social, political, ethical,
vital and personal, they may be directed, posit psycho-
logical premisses. Every exploration of the stream of
human affairs leads us to its fountain-head, the soul of
man ; and it is upon our view of its nature and operation
that all our evaluations must finally rest. European
thought, on emerging from the quaint rectilinear rigidities
of scholasticism, was compelled to regard epistemology,
the theory of cognition, as the propaedeutic to all other
thought. But far more is involved in the questions that
press upon the modern mind than mere speculative
curiosity ; and it is not our view of the operation of our
cognitive powers alone, but of the springs and determinants
of all action and of all thought, of all desire and endeavour,
which, it is borne in upon us, is implicit in all our judg-
ments. In the darkness and confusion of a human world
under reconstruction, where immemorial landmarks lie
strewn and buried under the debris of collapsed super-
structures, we shall vainly endeavour to thread our way
to any purpose unless we can pierce the obscurity by the
light of Psyche's lamp.

It is in some measure from a sense of that need that
reflective persons are drawn with renewed interest to
psychological problems, and that many who are unaddicted
to the sciences and to whom the very uncouthness of their

8 PSYCHE'S LAMP

language is repellent are disposed to relent from that
attitude in favour of the science of the soul.

The zeal of those enthusiastic inquirers meets, I fear,
with much discouragement and disappointment. Their
reports are in general most disconcerting. I have heard
some declare that there is no such thing as a science
of psychology ; that one might reach deep enough in the
study of its accredited textbooks and find little ; and
concerning such fragmentary and conflicting views as are
current they recalled the saying of Xenophanes, ' SO'KOC
S'tVi iraai Ttrvicrai ' opinion, ' doxy,' is over all.

The fact is that psychology is not an organized science.
Any department of inquiry becomes an organized science
only under the unifying and vitalizing influence of some
principle of interpretation which touches its basic con-
ceptions and informs each isolated fact with a significance
that knits it with all others into an organic whole. And,
since primitively the human mind leaves no blanks in
its scheme of things, any such basic interpretation can
only be attained by violently displacing principles and
conceptions previously accredited. Thus astronomy first
became an organized science by the overthrow of the
geocentric system and the enunciation of the Keplerian
laws ; dynamics arose from the downfall of the Aristotelian
dogma of motion and the formulation of the laws of
Galilei ; chemistry with Lavoisier's exposure of the
doctrine of phlogistic substance and his explanation of
oxydation. Biology came into being by the collapse of
the dogma of creation ; though, failing a consistent
view of the mode of operation of evolution, it remains
in the Copernican, and has not yet reached the Keplerian
phase of development. Physiology and psychology have
not yet become organized sciences at all. They are
merely aggregates of disjointed theories and observations
which, however valuable in themselves, afford no view
of the general character of the phenomena which they
investigate.

INTRODUCTION 9

Is it mere coincidence that the natural sciences have
developed in the order of the remoteness of their subject-
matter from the centre of human interest, and therefore
of human prejudice, from man himself ; first conquering
the distant stars, then the physical world, then the world
of organic life, and remaining at last held up by the
problems of man himself, his organism, his soul ? Is it
the intrinsic difficulty of the task or the force of established
prejudice which constitutes the increasing obstacle ?

There have been controversies in abundance, but no
revolutions in the realm of psychological science ; no
hieratic myth, no geocentric theory or doctrine of creation,
has been finally relegated to limbo. Paralogisms such,
to take but one instance, as ' the unity of the Ego,' which
was reduced to tatters over a century ago by the critique
of Kant, recur serenely as the leit-motiv of official teaching
in our great English universities in the present year of
grace. Is it plausible to suppose that while in every
other science progress has only been possible by the
sweeping away of primitive conceptions, here alone, of
all domains of knowledge, the human intellect has from
the first seized the outlines of truth so infallibly that
no occasion could arise to alter them ? When we con-
sider the genesis of psychological science from theological
ontology and scholastic epistemology, the academic
seclusion in which she has long been nurtured, in close
association with her confederate, the official Science of
Virtue, it may be suspected that in even greater measure
than in other fields of enquiry, the obstacles in her path
are not merely the rocks and natural accidents of the
ground, but walls and fences and artificial rockeries
raised by pious hands. And it can cause us little surprise
that the science of the soul has in general picked her steps
amid those venerable impediments with beseeming caution
and delicacy.

The methodical psychologist meets with his first per-
plexity as soon as he attempts to . define the province

10 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of his science. To define the ' province ' of a science
is not a matter of very vital importance ; for knowledge
is essentially one, and every aspect and portion of it
interweaves with, and bears upon, all others ; such
arbitrary subdivisions as we may choose to establish
being essentially devices of systematic convenience. One
would think to hear some speak that a science is a sort
of Imperialistic State, the frontiers of which must needs
be diplomatically delimitated on the map of knowledge,
or that it is some game of ball, of which the rules are
to be laid down in detail and honourably observed. One
psychologist says to another, ' That is not psychology,'
much as one might say, ' You're not playing the game ;
that isn't cricket.' A quite abnormal degree of importance
attaches here to this business of denning the right and
proper sphere of the science, an importance arising out
of the questionable situation of psychology on the border-
land of what are traditionally regarded as two wholly
disparate spheres of human knowledge the physical and
the metaphysical. That division itself, the expression
of a metaphysical dogma, is, I venture to consider, of no
more essential significance than any other subdivision
of human enquiry. The repudiation of metaphysics,
whether in science or in life, can never mean anything
else than the assumption of inconsidered, and therefore
fantastically false, metaphysics. Physical science, coming
as she does at every turn in contact with metaphysical
questions, is like all other sciences, compelled to posit
metaphysical postulates. Newton himself for all his
' hypotheses nonfingo ' teems with metaphysical doctrine ;
and modern physics is three parts metaphysical.

In the physical sciences the pretence of eluding
metaphysical questions may, however, be plausibly
enough maintained, for their outlook is sufficiently
characterized by the forms of physical experience.
But when psychology, ambitious of following the
example, likewise protests her unconcern with ontology,

INTRODUCTION 11

the profession is not at all so easy, is in fact desperately
impracticable. For the very enterprise upon which she
is embarked, the exploration of the inner world of mind,
posits a stupendous ontological dogma, namely, that
there is a distinct and self-contained world of mind
separated from all else by the unbridgeable abyss of
substantial disparity, and coextensive with conscious
experience.

That dogma, it is to be noted, did not in the first instance
arise full-blown out of the epistemological grounds on
which it has since come to rely for its justification. Long
before the latter became susceptible of distinct enunciation
the notion of the soul as a double of the living body,
suggested chiefly by dream experience, had become
immemorially established in primitive human thought.
The doctrine of substantial dissimilarity, elaborated in
Neoplatonic theosophy and Patristic theology, was first
set forth with uncompromising emphasis by Descartes,
the first writer who, in modern Europe, may be said
to have initiated a separate science of psychology. When
it is realized that no man has the remotest conception
of what a ' substance ' is, we may estimate the audacity
of laying down the existence of two distinct substances
differing in their essential nature, that is, in that about
which we know absolutely nothing. The dogmatism of
Descartes's procedure is displayed in the anticlimax which
it reached in his solution of the consequent question,
' Where should the distinct substance of mind be con-
sidered to begin ? ' For he pronounced all animals, and
likewise the human organism and its functions, to be
purely ' automatic,' that is, effects of the mechanical
forces of the physical world ; the unique substance, mind
or soul, being confined to a minute portion of the human
body, namely, the pineal gland. That conclusion of the
founder of the dualistic theory evinces a misconception of
the very grounds that may be advanced in its defence,
as ludicrous as that of the innocents who in the last

12 PSYCHE'S LAMP

century professed to evolve feeling out of the movements
of molecules.

Those grounds of distinction are epistemological, that
is, they are purely psychological.

Epistemologically the inner world of mind ' contains '
the entire universe. Orion and the Pleiades, sun-drifts
and nebulae, the globe, its hills and oceans, beasts and
birds, men and women, are, in so far as known, but parts,
feelings of the knowing mind, which by no possibility
can reach beyond its feelings. But that upsetting and
irrefutable demonstration which staggers and perplexes
the ' plain man/ seeming to dissolve the solid world
into such stuff as dreams are made on, leaves, as a matter
of fact, things exactly as they were before. For in that
universe of feelings ' contained ' within consciousness we
come anew upon the self-same relations and distinctions
between our feeling organism and the stars, ourselves and
our dinner, ourselves and the men and women about us,
as in the world of unsophisticated experience. Nothing
in it is changed by the Berkeleyan poser, which amounts
to saying that we only know things by having a knowledge
of them. What that ' knowing ' is, is the real question.

Consciousness is feeling ; and we can know, be aware
of, conscious of, nothing but our own feelings. But feelings
have developed the peculiar property of being presentative,
of representing, that is, something other than the ex-
perienced feeling itself. Every feeling can be converted
into an object of presentation by thinking about it ;
our anger of an hour ago, our toothache of last month,
our sorrow, can be contemplated. Our feeling in so doing
is no longer anger, toothache, or sorrow, but the presenta-
tion of those feelings. And the feelings thus presented,
or represented, can only be feelings of which we ourselves
have already had experience ; we can only present to
ourselves our own feelings.

Some feelings have, however, in relation to the urging
needs of life, become presentative in a special manner ;

INTRODUCTION 13

and the object of their presentation is what we call
' matter.' We shall see that those sensory feelings have
been differentiated by degrees out of the original, primitive
feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness ; and not all
sensory feelings are to the same degree differentiated,
nor do they all supply the elements of our perception
of matter. A world, for instance, that should present
no sensory feelings but those of smell, of warmth, of
formless colour, would not furnish the notion of matter,
would be purely solipsistic. In their fully developed
form those sensory feelings constitute our knowledge of
matter. ' Knowledge ' that can obviously never be the
thing itself ; my presentation of last month's toothache
is not my toothache, even though the object of presenta-
tion is here a feeling which I have experienced, and the
presentation of it as close a copy, presumably, of the
original as a presentation can be ; it is a rehearsal, a
reproduction of the same affective attitude. But what
does the presentation of matter reproduce or rehearse ?

To reproduce my own experienced feelings is a fairly
intelligible performance ; the object of presentation is
a former attitude of the mind, and all that is required
is to assume the same or a similar attitude. But to
present, to picture something which is not my feelings,
something quite different from my feelings, is a feat of
intuition which could only be regarded as an inscrutable
and unintelligible miracle. That, of course, is no bar
to our recognizing the miracle in a world where much
is inscrutable and unintelligible. But, in fact, that
incongruous miracle does not happen. The perception
of matter is not at all an intuition of something different
from our feelings : it is, just as much as our presentation
of toothache or anger, a presentation in terms of our
feelings. What those sensory feelings which supply the
perception of matter present is a perfectly definite thing,
it is the representation of our potential actions ; that
and nothing else. Matter, its spacial extension and

14 PSYCHE'S LAMP

relations, its form, resistance, consistency and texture,
as presented by tactile exploration and manipulation,
molar directed movements, and their synthesis in visual
perception, represents the possibilities of our activity in
the ambient in which we move. That ambient is ' external '
precisely because we can act upon it ; and the ' object of
presentation ' is nothing else than the object of action,
and the form of its presentation that of possible action.

Look at the starry heavens, the sea, the earth, the
living bodies upon it ; does that sensory spectacle of
solid substantiality convey to you any information beyond
the variety of actions which, disporting yourself in it,
and manipulating it, you could in thought perform ?
There are, to be sure, certain superadded features in it,
colours, odours, sounds, temperatures, which do not
represent your molar action ; but those features, which
in other ways serve the purpose of guiding action, do
not enter into your perception of material substantiality,
and need not therefore concern us here. The very fact
that they are discarded and set aside as irrelevant in
our concept of matter should in itself somewhat pointedly
indicate the nature of that concept ; it is entirely made
up of the projection of our active movements, it presents
nothing else.

' Knowledge ' of matter in terms of our motor activities
is perfectly correct, reliable, and complete. Let us get
rid of the superstition that there is anything illusory
or deceptive about it. The accuracy of our presentation
of matter is the most readily and the most constantly
verifiable knowledge we possess. That log of wood which
appears to me as distant so many paces, of a certain
size and form, of a certain rigidity and texture, is exactly
what it appears to be ; every one of those impressions
I can verify by going up to it, handling it, operating
on it. Sensation may under certain circumstances be
deceptive, as when I mistake a flat painted surface, or a
reflection, for a solid body, or estimate the size of the

INTRODUCTION 15

moon as less than that of the Peloponnese ; those are
illusions because subsequent activity will not be consis-
tent with those presentations formed from inadequate
experience. But there is no illusion whatever in the
normal presentation of matter, for it quite accurately
represents everything which it professes to represent. 1

Illusion, deception, are only introduced by theoretical
thought when it conceives that the presentation of possible
action represents anything else, that sensory knowledge
of matter is I know not what inconceivable ' reflection '
or ' picture ' of its ' being ' or ' substance.' That is gross,
glaring fallacy and absurdity, but it is not sensory per-
ception, but metaphysical misthought that is responsible
for it. And that absurdity of thought is exposed by
thought in the flat self-contradiction of a substance
which exists independently, that is, apart from our
feelings, and the attributes of whose existence yet
consist solely in feelable characters. It is the essence
of the concept of ' substance ' to be what it is inde-
pendently of any relation to anything else,* while it
is the essence of matter that all its characters depend
upon our feeling it. No two concepts could stand
in more radical opposition to one another ; and no
contradiction could be more absolute than the identifica-
tion of the two.

1 Any understanding of matter was absolutely impossible for
faculty-psychology, and is so, so long as sensation is regarded as
' given.' " The senses do not deceive because they do not judge,"
said Kant. On the contrary, they do judge, but that judgment is
entirely one of possible action.

u TO Trpwrwf ov, KCU aTrXwe ov."

Aristotle, Metaphys. vii, c, i.
" Substantia est ens tanquam per se habens esse."

Aquinas, De Potentia, a, vii.
" Res cujus naturae debetur non esse in alio."

Aquinas, Quodlibet, ix, a, v ad 2.

" Substance is a thing which exists of itself in such manner
that it needs for its existence no other thing."

Pesc.ajtes ; Princip, Philosoph. I, n. 51,

16

As soon as we think of matter not as an object of
action, but as a source of action, not as acted upon, but
as an agent, we leave entirely behind us the domain of
sensory presentation.

Sensory experience presents in addition to matter
itself the movements of matter, that is, the changes
which continually take place in the field of our possible
actions. Our own activity consists in nothing else than
in producing such changes in the material field. The
activity of matter, then, is of precisely the same character
as our own activity which the presentation of matter
delineates in its potential form ; both ourselves and
matter are sources of activity.

The way in which we ourselves come to act, to produce
changes in matter, is very varied and complex. It is
in fact the study and elucidation of that process which
constitutes the whole subject-matter of the science of
psychology. And there is here a radical difficulty which
is a fertile source of perplexity and confusion. Our
activity is not directly represented in our consciousness.
We can have presentations of our actions and of their
effects in the material world in just the same manner as
we can witness any other material changes, we can have
presentations of possible or of intended actions, we desire
certain objects, we have various sensations of muscular
effort, feelings of hesitation and of conflicting motives,
of resolution and decision, but our acts themselves are
not feelings and cannot be represented as feelings.
Feelings are in fact, as we shall see, the very converse
of our activity, they are actions upon us, and cannot
therefore possibly represent our own actions. Our actions
are material, they are performed by our material bodies
on material objects ; and it is here precisely that the
gap occurs which puzzles and perplexes us, the gap
between our idea of moving our arm and the actual move-
ment of our arm. We are at a loss to conceive how the
one can be ' translated,' as we say, into the other. The

INTRODUCTION 17

cause of action cannot be presented in terms of matter,
which is the object of action, or in terms of feeling, which
is the effect of action ; hence our total incapacity of
forming any presentation of a primum mobile. We
give various names to the cause of activity, such as force,
power, will, energy, and the like, but those words do
not stand for any clear presentation whether in terms
of matter or of feeling.

But, although we have no feeling of action, all our
feelings are in one way or in another intimately connected
with our actions ; and we regard ourselves as agents,
we have the general sense of activity, not because we
have any feeling of agency, but because every feeling
of ours is directly related to our acting, and has no
significance apart from it. And thus it is that in spite
of the absence of any presentation of activity, the cause
of activity is conceived, however vaguely and inconsistently,
in terms of our feelings. And indeed we cannot do other-
wise ; for all presentations whatsoever are and must
needs be in terms of our own feelings, even sensory
presentations being in reality nothing else but represen-
tations of our own feelings. Accordingly, when we think
of matter as a source of action we are thrown back on
a presentative analogy of our own feelings.

The physicist in his investigation of physical phenomena
aims at inquiring not only into our possible action upon
things, but into the causes of the actions, the movements
of things. This he can to some extent accomplish in two
ways, either by linking up things into larger systems
by means of ' laws ' or by an ' ether,' or by decomposing
things into smaller and smaller constituents, into molecules
and atoms, and thus explaining the total resultant action
of things in terms of the movements of their component
parts as ' forms of motion.' But, having subdivided
things into parts, he is inevitably brought at last, if he
desires to go farther into the explanation of actions, to
a conceptual presentation which is no longer in terms

2

18 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of sensation, that is, of our action upon things, but in
terms, darkly and vaguely, of our pure feelings. To
the physicist the ultimate source of motion is, it is true,
but a mathematical symbol, the value of which is the
sum of effects ; but it can only be presented, thought of,
as a presentation of feeling, just as our presentations
of the feelings of other men and women can be nothing
else than the presentation, by analogy, of our own feelings.

Men and women are sensorily presented to us as
corporeal, material objects ; we also think of them by
inference as having feelings similar to our own. If we
imagine ourselves peering into the living structure of
their organisms, of their brains, say, or of the cells of
their brains, of the molecules and atoms of those cells,
we are still regarding them in precisely the same way
as when viewing the flesh of their limbs ; to peer into
their anatomy can only assist us in explaining their
actions by enabling us to discover in the movements of
the constituent parts of their organisms the components
of the total movements of those organisms ; but so far
as perceiving anything else we are exactly as far advanced
when viewing their skin as when viewing their cerebral
molecules : we are perceiving them as stun! that we can
manipulate. From the presentation of manipulatable stuff I
cannot derive that of a feeling or that of a source of activity.
But if we peer into living structure with the eye of the
physicist, seeking the source of its activity, it is not upon
molecules or atoms that we come, but upon something
which, although it is not indeed feeling, is so intimately
connected with it that it is constantly confused with
it and represented in terms of feeling.

The science of psychology in its academical development,
and likewise in the blind and futile revolt against it which
arrayed itself in the incongruous garb of a quasi-physio-
logical materialism, has built upon the quicksand of a
metaphysical confusion of thought. And the consequences
are not, as many have imagined, to be eluded by loudly

INTRODUCTION 19

repudiating all metaphysical responsibility, and by tossing
over the problem of ' the relation between mind and
matter ' to its inventor, the metaphysician. On the
contrary, those consequences, like avenging furies, dog
every step of the psychologist and pervade every portion
of his insecure superstructure, which, while it lasts, is
an enchanted castle fatally unamenable to any inter-
pretative effort, and which must at last come tumbling
about his ears in the utter ruin of irreconcilable antinomies.
For as long as it remains a ' separate ' and self-contained
universe no interpretation of any phenomenon within it
is possible, unless it can prove itself to be indeed complete,
and can discover within its own orbit the causes and the
effects of its constituent elements ; and in proportion
as the psychologist entrenches himself within a line of
demarcation drawn with emphasized stringency, protesting
that ' conscious experience ' alone is his concern, that
' psychology is introspection, and what is not introspection
is not psychology/ do his difficulties grow more desperate.
And whether that ' separate universe ' confesses to the
scholastic impeachment of substantiality or no makes
no essential difference ; it must share the fate of the
dualistic fallacy, which is in reality a form of materialism,
for it is from the substantiality of matter that the notion
has been extended to mind, thus creating a second
' substance,' and the latter must inevitably be involved
in the ruin of matter.

There is no such thing as a self-contained world of
consciousness.

To epistemological psychology the mind naturally was
a cognizing, knowing thing, the Nous, nay, a thinking
thing the res cogitans of Descartes ; the soul, or in more
modern phraseology, the ' subject of experience,' was a
spectator, and consciousness ( ein Schauspiel nur.' It is
a fact, which in our revolt against that paralytic view of
mental life we are prone to minimize, that consciousness
is overwhelmingly cognitive ; and the more elaborate its

20 PSYCHE'S LAMP

development, the more is its centre of focused distinctness
occupied with presentations and with cognitive processes.
It is not cognition alone, but the entire world of conscious-
ness, which is functionally subordinate to the conative
activities of the organism, to which every element of
consciousness converges and of which it is an instrument
and product. And that activity which constitutes the
basis of all conscious phenomena, as of all life, is not
itself an element of consciousness, is not represented in
consciousness. To take a trivial everyday illustration,
self-knowledge of our own individual ' character ' is not
to be derived from any introspective experience, but from
experience of our actual behaviour just as if we were
dealing as an indifferent observer with the behaviour
of some other individual. Consequently no science of
introspective experience is possible ; for such a science
would of necessity be compelled to limit itself to objects
of which it must needs ignore both the causes and the
effects as well as every link and connection between their
constituent elements ; and those objects of investigation
would therefore remain, in spite of any metaphysical
disclaimer, as completely isolated as any scholastic
' substance ' or dualistic ' epiphenomenon/ and therefore
destitute of any possible significance and for ever insus-
ceptible of intelligible apprehension. Setting aside the
linking of every mental process at either end through
action and sensation with the material world, it is, on
the contrary, impossible to investigate fundamentally
any single event of conscious experience without the
fact being revealed that nine parts of the process lie
outside consciousness. Every fact of consciousness is but
a detached and disconnected phrase torn from its context,
and that context has to be sought elsewhere. Within
the sphere of cogitation itself, the professedly characteristic
sphere of the epistemologically conceived mind, the laws
of the association of ideas by which it was once sought
to connect the discontinuous elements of consciousness

INTRODUCTION 21

by an intelligible nexus, and thus to make experience
a self-contained whole, are but superficial appearances
of limited and questionable applicability. The elements
of consciousness are only to a very small extent connected
with one another ; it is in a sphere which is not that of
conscious experience that the actual connection takes
place. That supposed substantive and separate world
of mind, of conscious experience, turns out to be
but as the jagged crest of an iceberg the bulk of
which lies submerged in a world which is not that
of consciousness.

It is, in short, nothing less than the complete disso-
lution of the concept of mind which the science of
mind is at the present day called upon to witness. Mind
is consciousness, what is not consciousness is not mind ;
yet the greater portion of mental processes lies outside
the precincts of consciousness. Like her twin sister,
matter, mind has become an untenable incongruity.
Matter, that other child of primitive metaphysics, crumbles
under the fingers of the physical inquirer. The physicist,
however, is not pledged to save matter and cares little
about its dissolution so long as he has definite dynamic
energies to measure. But when the science of the soul
also finds herself left with unconscious dynamic energies
on her hands, either the definition of psychology or that
of mind calls for radical reformulation.

Consider what distance we have travelled from the
course laid down by scholastic psychology when a
psychologist l quietly proposes to define the one-time
science of mind as the Science of Behaviour. Behaviour !
Not ideas, not the soul, not the inner world, not that
Cartesian substance secluded in splendid isolation within
its corporeal tenement, is deemed the proper sphere of
the science of mind, but the way people act, move their
hands and feet, and what comes out of their mouths.
In that conception of psychology a human being is placed

1 Dr. W. McDougall.

22 PSYCHE'S LAMP

under observation and his reactions studied in precisely
the same manner as those of a metal or a gas.

That definition goes, to be sure, too far in the direction
of objectivity. For it is the privilege of the psychologist
to penetrate somewhat farther than the chemist or the
physicist. He can not only note the nature of those
reactions as they are actually seen in the behaviour of
men and women under the eye of an observer, he can go
behind the scenes and explore, at least a little way, the
factors which modify and determine those reactions, a
privilege which the chemist and the physicist do not
enjoy.

If a definition of the scope of psychological science
be insisted on, it is as the Science of the Factors of
Behaviour that it might most aptly be described. For
those objects of consciousness, those presentations and
ideas, those thoughts and those feelings of which conscious-
ness is compacted, can no longer be regarded as the phan-
tasmal objects of a contemplative vision, but are means
and instruments whereby the quality of action is deter-
mined ; and that is their sole function. ' The mind,'
consciousness, is no mere spectacle that can justify its
existence by being simply viewed, but a link in the
process of doing, a factor of action, one of the devices
whereby through living beings changes are effected in
the universe.

CHAPTER I
ACTION AND PURPOSE

LIFE, then, in us and in all beings, is manifested by
actions. For each act, wise or foolish, that we perform
we are in general able to adduce a rational justification
by reference to an ulterior end, by showing, that is, that
our action is a means to an end. The act is therefore
described as purposive, and the end to which it is directed
is called the purpose of the act. Most of our acts are
thus referable to a proximate purpose, which again is
conditioned by some ulterior purpose, that again by
another, and so on. Our purposes, the justifications
of our acts, are thus encased like a nest of Chinese boxes
the one within the other. We dress that we may go
out, we go out that we may be at a given place at a given
time, we keep the appointment that we may advance
some business upon which we are engaged, we are engaged
upon it in order to earn money, we seek money in order
to live, we live . . . Here we reach the last box of the
Chinese puzzle. We wish to live, life is desirable ; that
must serve as a sufficient reason. Or if we want to put
a better face upon the matter, we may say that it is
our duty to live, that for the sake of our family, for the
sake of mankind, of some ideal or other, we are willing
to bear the whips and scorns of time. But whether we
aim high or low, in every such reference of our motives
to some ulterior principle, we come at last upon a
categorical end arbitrarily pronounced to be desirable.
That ' ultimate purpose ' by which we justify our proxi-

23

24 PSYCHE'S LAMP

mate and ulterior purposes stands itself in need of justifi-
cation and, being ultimate, it is left unjustified. No
rational account of the goal of our acts is to be formu-
lated ; for such a formulation would entail its conversion
into a means by reference to some object beyond it.
The concentric series upon which every act of our lives,
as a purposive act, rests, regresses to a purpose, the
purpose of which is not to be set down in thought.
To justify that end, to name the purpose which it
serves would be to give an answer to the last riddle of
things. No thinker, no system of metaphysics, no fancy
of mysticism or claim of revelation, has succeeded in
prefiguring, even darkly and dimly, such an end. All
our purposes are in the end purposeless.

The purposes which we formulate as rational justifications
of our actions are, then, of quite subsidiary import. They
do not represent the end of our actions, but merely various
steps which we adopt as means towards that end. What
we do is not to act in view of a given purpose, but to
discover the means of achieving something which we are
impelled to do. The impulse which prompts us to adopt
a particular purpose as a means to the satisfaction of
that impulse is the motive power that sets us, or any
organism, in motion. It is the impulse which determines
the purpose, not the purpose which determines the impulse.

We use the words ' purpose ' and ' motive ' as synonyms :
we say that a given purpose was the ' motive ' of such
and such an action. But a purpose is not a motive.
No human being was ever set in motion by a purpose.
You may conceive all the purposes you please, they will
not move you an inch unless you are impelled to make
use of them. The attribution of motive power to a
purpose Aristotle's ' final cause ' is a flagitious mis-
conception. Our actions are produced by the continued
operation of an efficient cause, the impulse that actuates
them ; the operation is only converted into an ' ideal
end ' by the introduction of means devised by the intellect

ACTION AND PURPOSE 25

in the service of that operation, which thus becomes an
intellectual category of finality by reference to those
intellectual means. That finality is derived from the
instrumentality, not from the active operation itself.
Remove that use of means, and only the bare fact of
action is left, divested of any ' final cause.' A purpose in
view is only a particular device by which the efficient
cause operates.

To have a formulated purpose in view is by no means
a condition of action. It is only in difiicult and unfamiliar
circumstances that we devise means by the process of
thought, and thus act with ' an end in view.' But that
rational devising of means is but one of many ways in
which the impulses of life operate ; it is a quite exceptional
mode of behaviour. We do not go about life in that
scheming, designing fashion ; we do not unpack our
nest of Chinese boxes at every turn. That is an act of
philosophy, not the ordinary procedure of life. The
purposes of most of our acts are only consciously for-
mulated as an afterthought. That formulation is a
ratiocinative spelling backwards of the actual psychological
process. It is an a -posteriori psychological analysis, a
post-mortem which we hold on our actions. Our intel-
lectualistic analysis extends to all our acts a language
derived from a very exceptional type of action ; and by
calling the ways and means which we employ to satisfy
the impulses that actuate us ' purposes,' we consider
that our actions are thus rationally justified, and that
we are actuated by purposes. That, of course, is the
purest delusion.

To explain how our actions are brought about used to
be thought a fairly simple matter. It was considered
and is even now considered by some writers who ought
to know better that the question is adequately elucidated
by saying that we seek what gives us pleasure and shun
what gives us pain, and that the motive force of our
lives is to strive after happiness.

36 PSYCHE'S LAMP

It appears incredible that anyone accustomed to clear
thinking should ever have deluded himself into accepting
such an answer, upon which, as the reader knows, whole
systems of philosophy and even of politics have been
founded. The pleasure-and-pain theory is merely a
verbal roundabout : Why do we desire a given object ?
Because it affords us satisfaction. Why does it afford
us satisfaction ? Because we desire it. In the merry-
go-round of such a vicious circle there is no getting
farther. The formula leads us at once into desperate
difficulties when we endeavour to discriminate between
one order of actions and another. The hedonistic
psychologist is at once held up by his old friend the
martyr, and is eventually compelled to draw up a scale
of pleasures and happinesses on grounds wholly extra-
neous to his theory ; for we have no means whatever
of instituting a quantitative comparison between the
pleasure of the sot and that of the saint on the whole
one would be inclined to consider the former's more
massive.

The reason of those difficulties is that it is not the
satisfaction which determines the desire, but the desire
which determines the satisfaction. The pleasures and
pains which we seek or shun are not attributes of given
objects or situations, for the same object or situation
will produce various and opposite feelings in different
organisms, and in the same organism at different times.
Those feelings depend on dispositions within ourselves
which objects and situations affect favourably or un-
favourably. Pleasure is the satisfaction of our impulses,
pain is their thwarting. The pleasant or unpleasant
quality of a feeling is the representation in our consciousness
of the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the impulses that
actuate us. Various forms of satisfaction, that of the
glutton and that of the hero, differ not because they weigh
or measure more, but because they are the satisfaction
of different impulses. And since all impulses tend towards

27

their satisfaction, the pleasure-pain theory is a tautological
truism.

It is extremely questionable, however, whether the
formula is even true in its tautological sense. It arose
as an a priori theoretical assumption rather than as a
matter of psychological induction. Is it true that a
feeling of pleasure is invariably attached to the acts
or to the ideas of the acts which we are impelled to do ?
Throughout organic life living beings are constantly sub-
mitting to all manner of pains and discomforts in their
obstinate obedience to master-impulses, and it is very
disputable whether in doing so any prospect or sense
of greater pleasure or lessened pain enters into their
conscious feelings at all. They will make exces-
sive efforts and wade through jungles of discomfort
in order to satisfy a quite moderate degree of hunger
or appetite, altogether disproportionate to the heroisms
manifested in indulging it. The reproductive instinct
constantly chooses martyrdom with no prospect whatever
of pleasure. Is the feeling of the hen-bird which turns
against the dogs in defence of her brood one of pleasure ?
No animal, in fact, and no human being spontaneously
balances his profit and loss account. The true martyr and
hero, like the invertebrate organism, does not feel at all
in terms of pleasure and pain. The thinker who deliber-
ately chooses poverty, bitterness, and the kicks of asses,
in the service of odious and unpopular ideas knows quite
well what he is about from the standpoint of the pleasure-
and-pain balance-sheet. The appeal of strong or high
impulses is quite independent of the physiological con-
trivance of pleasure and pain. The surrender to the
imperative urge of a mastering impulse is accompanied
by a feeling-tone, but even the non-thinker judges it to
be an abuse of language to call that feeling pleasure.
Consider the appeal from a purely affective point of
view of all sad, melancholy, and even harrowing feelings
and interests, provided they are on a high or a fundamental

28 PSYCHE'S LAMP

plane. The appeal of tragedy, for instance, has never
been satisfactorily accounted for by the analysis of the
pleasure-and-pain psychology. Pleasure and pain are
primitive forms of feeling which serve their purpose of
guidance in the more rudimentary, physiological stages
of reaction ; in higher development and in connection
with the more powerful, fundamental impulses they lose
their importance and sink into comparative insignificance.
The appeal of affective values is then sufficient in itself
without assuming the primitive form of crude pleasure
and pain. Where impulses are weak and hesitant, and
therefore liable to be misled, they are guided by lively
feelings of pleasure and pain, but where they are strong,
reckless, ruthless, those leading-strings are superfluous,
and are accordingly dispensed with.

The cause of our acting in a particular way is a dis-
position to act in that particular way. That explanation
may sound unsatisfactory, and akin to that given by
Moliere's physician of the dormitive virtue of opium ;
but it is the only one which we are entitled to give. We
do not know the cause of our disposition to act, and
where we cannot describe a thing by its causes we are
compelled to describe it by its effects.

Ordinary human thought and the profoundest efforts
of philosophers have always sought to disguise the
crudity of that explanation. They have either tried to
believe that we are actuated by ' purposes,' or by the
quest of a certain thing called pleasure or happiness
notions which are quite erroneous and fallacious. Or they
have given to our dispositions to act various names, such
as the 'Will,' 'Will to power/ and the like. 'Will'
and ' power ' are words which simply mean a disposition
to act. To call our disposition to act ' Will ' throws no
more light on it than if we were to call it ' Tom ' ; and it
has the disadvantage of suggesting misleading connotations.

The actions of living organisms are varied ; human
beings differ widely in their behaviour from animals and

ACTION AND PURPOSE 20

from one another. Tastes differ, likes and dislikes differ.
The conative dispositions manifested in behaviour appear
to be greatly diversified.

Your own personal tastes are, I make no doubt, exquisite
and refined. You are, we will suppose, keenly interested
in art and in science ; you seek your truest pleasures in
all that the human spirit has achieved of subtlest and of
most precious and delicate. Those refined tastes of yours
are, of course, the product of . a certain education, of
a certain culture ; your mind is trained to higher and
more perfect pleasures, taps sources of interest and
gladness that for the ignorant multitude are non-existent.
In short, as you will readily admit, the tastes in the
things you delight in and value are acquired tastes. The
Philistine to whom they are caviare will pronounce them
to be ' acquired tastes ' with a distinct note of disparage-
ment in the expression. Those Pheidian marbles, say,
the sight of which moves you with a strange thrill, that
music that delights you, will cause neither pleasure nor
pain to your greengrocer. He will probably prefer beer
to Beethoven.

There are other tastes likewise, other likes and dislikes,
other determinants of your actions, which, no less than
your artistic or scientific tastes, are acquired. Your
table-manners, for instance, your behaviour in social
intercourse, the actions that derive from traditional and
customary estimates and opinions, the whole beseemingness
of your conduct and deportment, an enormous part of
your morality, of your conscience. There are yet other
and deeper dispositions which are equally, however
anciently, in the stream of your heredity, acquired ;
a host of instincts, like the instincts of animals, which
are the product of a long evolution from primal protoplasm
onwards ; primeval appetites and fears, ancient racial
memories, the combativeness of remote male ancestors,
the constructiveness of old builders, the sentiments of
primitive worshippers, the gregariousness of antediluvian

80 PSYCHE'S LAMP

herds ; instincts which, down to physiological functional
appetites, hark back to an immemorial ancestry, but
which were, by that ancestry, acquired, the fruit of a
long education by experience of the race. Those inherited
instincts were originally no less acquired than your
pleasure in Greek marbles or Tschaikowski symphonies.

The fact is that all the forms of your conative dispositions,
all your specific tendencies, likes and dislikes, are in their
origin acquired characters. They are not original, innate
and intrinsic characters of life, but products of develop-
ment by experience. A specific appetence can arise in
no other way.

A disposition to act can, in a living organism, become
directed towards a definite object only as a result of
experience of that object. You do not know whether
you will like or dislike a thing until you have tried. You
may, of course, by a broad induction describe the kinds
of things or experiences you like and those you dislike.
You may say, for instance, that you have a liking for
literature or the drama ; but you must have read a
particular book, seen a particular play, before you are
in a position to say definitely whether you like them or
no. The object of the reviews is to guide you as to the
probability of your liking the book or the play sufficiently
to justify you in spending your money on it. But the
question can only be definitely settled by your reading
or your hearing. Do you like Chinese music ? do you
like Arabian poetry ? do you like the view from Corcovado ?
The questions are absurd unless you have lived in China,
studied Arabic, visited Rio.

We do not know what we like and what we dislike until
we have tried ; we do not know whether a given object
will satisfy or offend our conative dispositions, whether
it will give us pleasure or pain. Hence conies about
the ingenuous illusion that pleasure and pain are the
determinants of our actions. The conative dispositions
of living organisms must first have been tested by

ACTION AND PURPOSE 81

particular situations, by particular objects, before they
can be known as pleasure or pain, appetence or averseness,
before they can be established in the race as organized
tendencies towards a certain form of satisfaction, a certain
type of action. It is the process of experience, it is
feeling and cognition with all their infinite variety which
reveal the character of the conative dispositions of life,
evolve them into specific desires, instincts, appetences,
and bring about the correspondingly infinite variety of
impulses into which the elemental dispositions of life
become diversified.

Suppose that you are a chemist and that some entirely
new mineral, a new element, which has been discovered
in the bowels of the earth, is brought to you for the first
time. You will set about investigating its properties ;
you will subject your new element to all manner of
experiments, try the effects of heat, of electricity, of
magnetism upon it, and of all the reagents and acids
in your laboratory. The new element will behave in a
definite way when subjected to each of those conditions,
and you will be able to draw up an account of its various
reactions, of the definite way in which it behaves in
various circumstances. Although the mineral, which has
slept for some billions of years in the depths of the earth,
may never before have been subjected to such diversified
treatment, been pounded in a mortar, had nitric acid
poured over it, had evil-smelling sulphuretted hydrogen
blown through it, been calcinated, magnetized, liquefied,
gasified, its behaviour in each of those trying conditions
is exactly determined by its constitution ; every one of
its reactions to a new condition reveals properties that
lay latent in the disposition of its energy.

So it is with the dispositions that actuate living
organisms. Life, we believe, is continuous from the first
primordial protozoon to our own organism ; at no time,
if we allow the conception of organic evolution, has any
new principle entered into it, been superadded to its

82 PSYCHE'S LAMP

disposition. Life reacts to experience, to feeling, to
pleasure and pain ; but that reaction is determined by
the conative disposition of which it is the expression
in consciousness. As experience becomes diversified, so
do the forms which the conative disposition of life assumes ;
as experience exparids, so does the scope of life's energies
expand ; as feeling, cognition, develop, so do those energies
attain to fuller, clearer expression of their direction and
tendency. Anteriorly to experience they grope in a world
unrealized, and no living being knows, we know not in
our consciousness, what chord of feeling, pleasant or
unpleasant, that experience will strike upon the disposi-
tions of our being.

We have no knowledge, apart from experience, of the
direction and tendency of the conative dispositions that
actuate us. We do not know the law, so to speak, of our
impulses. We are quite unable from any introspective
knowledge to define the character, the ' whither ' of
those dispositions. We are not in a position to answer
off-hand the question, ' Whither do our desires tend ? '

Nothing surely, it would appear at first blush, is more
vividly known to us than our desires, what we should
like. If anyone were to request you to be good enough
to draw out a little list of your desiderata, on the under-
standing that they would be duly fulfilled, you would
certainly accept the task with considerable zest and
enthusiasm ; and, whether you take an interest in
psychology or no, you would think that the most delightful
exercise ever devised in psycho-analysis. Your desires
would come tumbling over one another an income of
a million or so, exuberant health and a long life, that
house, that steam-yacht that you have had your eye
upon, the love of that woman, freedom, leisure to enjoy
it all, and so forth. No task would be easier, you think,
than to express your desires.

But would it really be so easy ?

Mr. H. G. Wells has somewhere a story about a common-

ACTION AND PURPOSE 83

place young man to whom was granted the gift of perform-
ing miracles, of realizing whatever came into his head.
And the story of what he did with that priceless power
is a tale of such absurd tomfoolery and senseless, dangerous
pranks that even he, though below the average of stupidity,
came to see the idiocy of it, and his utter unfitness, from
the point of view of his own welfare, to be trusted with
such a power ; and that he asked to be relieved of it.
Mr. Wells's thaumaturgic young man was a particularly
stupid specimen ; but most of us, I think, would experience
considerable embarrassment in making use of omnipotence.
How delightful it would be, you may have indulged in
the day-dream after reading the Arabian Nights, to have
the Slave of the Lamp make his bow before you and ask
you to take the trouble to wish. One or two very simple
wishes would probably occur to you at once, but you
would very soon realize that any formulation of your
wishes, to be at all consistent, and anything but grossly
absurd, would require very careful consideration and
deliberation, would indeed be not at all such an easy task
as it seems, but a problem of considerable difficulty.
We should, on consideration, if we had any discretion,
probably end by asking our Slave of the Lamp to allow
us a day or two to think the matter over carefully. Most
of the things that it would naturally occur to us to wish
for, wealth, health, long life, talent, are not ends in
themselves, but merely means towards some object of
appetence which we leave wholly undefined. We wish
for Monte Cristo's millions, but what use we should make
of them when we had them is quite another question.
The scrambling sacra fames for wealth is mostly not an
appetence at all for a positive object, but a negative
desire to be relieved from the carking cares and abominable
petty anxieties of non-wealth. I once came in a news-
paper upon an account of a middle-aged couple somewhere
in the United States who unexpectedly succeeded to
millionaire wealth. This is the way in which they

3

84 PSYCHE'S LAMP

employed the money : they had a palatial residence
built, the greater part of which consisted in sumptuously
appointed drinking saloons, where they invited their
friends to come and get intoxicated at their expense ;
when they went for a drive they were preceded by a
brass band.

The pathetic impotence of our imagination whenever
we endeavour to define or describe our heart's desire
is vividly instanced in the utter and universal failure of
all attempts to give any, even the most general, description
of the delights of Paradise. Of the torments of Hell we
have a multitude of detailed, vivid and entirely satisfactory
descriptions, from those of the monk Tyndal and of Dante
to the admirable manual published by Father Furniss
for the use of young children, in which the boiling of
the brain in the skull of an unbaptized infant, and the
circulation of molten lead in the veins of unbelievers
are minutely and convincingly described. But when it
comes to picturing the condition of the souls of the blessed,
the paralysis of our imagination is so complete, so pitiful,
so manifest, that even the exponents of the happiness
of the heavenly state who are most anxious to impress
us with its surpassing desirability are driven to disown
all attempts to formulate its nature, and to declare that
the form and nature of that happiness is wholly incon-
ceivable and indescribable, even in the most general terms.

We realize that a condition in which the desires that we
can formulate should be completely satisfied would be a
state of tedium and boredom before which the imagination
recoils in horror. As a matter of fact, as we shall under-
stand better by and by, such a state would not be merely
one of boredom, it would be a state of unconsciousness.
The Heaven of the Christian, perfect happiness, involves,
no less than that of the Buddhist, as a psychological
necessity the annihilation of consciousness. The condition
of ' happiness ' is not the satisfaction of existing desires,
but the progressive satisfaction of ever new desires. And

ACTION AND PURPOSE 35

the nearest possible approach within the limits of our
experience to such a condition is not any perfected and
rounded satisfaction, but the opportunity for the continuous
exercise of our powers of self-development.

In nothing are we so completely powerless as in con-
ceiving the tendency of our desires and appetites. The
only desires that we are capable of conceiving are either
for objects which have already been disclosed to us by
our experience, or for the means towards some end which
is left wholly undefined.

And yet it is clear that our wistfulness does not stop
at the limit of the desires that we can formulate. It
certainly reaches beyond them. There are in us wholly
undeveloped capacities for joy. We all know the truth
of the expression that there are times when ' we do not
know what we want/ We are in a state of general
dissatisfaction which we cannot specify, and for which
we can suggest no remedy. We have come to a loose
end. Maybe we shall have the good fortune to come
upon an experience that will at once clear up the matter ;
we shall have found the satisfaction of which we were
unwittingly in search, and our soul cries * Eureka.' But
until that ' Eureka ' comes we are but thrusting out the
pseudopods of our vain desires we know not whither.
We are dull to perceive our soul's affinities ; experience
must needs pound insistently at us to awaken them into
consciousness.

. . . Conosceste i dubbiosi desiri ?

* Knew ye your dubious desires ? ' asks Dante of Francesca
in that great poem of love's tragedy. Nothing is clearer
than the goal to which the most potent motive impulse
of living things is directed the perpetuation of the race.
But is that end even dimly present to the consciousness
of the lover ? Is it present to consciousness in the effect
upon us of wafted music, of blowing scents, in art, in
poetry, which strike the chords of undefined emotions ?

36 PSYCHE'S LAMP

The patent goal of the impulse which urges three-
fourths of life is as unconscious as the most mechanical
instinct which we count insentient and blind. And what
is plainly manifest in that impulse which bestirs life to
its fiercest activities is no less true of every end which
under the illusory disguise of some short-reaching purpose
we are driven to pursue. The ulterior ends, the goals,
towards which our desires are but steps, remain hidden.
Like the mason-wasp that stores food for the offspring
of which she knows nothing, we are led to narrow desires
by instincts to the end of which we are entirely blind.
The inmost springs of our soul are unexpressed, unconscious
and unknown.

The scope of that activity which is in us conscious is
entirely confined to the sphere of means by which un-
formulated impulses strive towards realization in action.
The source and the ultimate end of those actions are
unrepresented in consciousness. The impulses which
actuate our consciousness and our behaviour are as blind,
as unconscious, as the instincts of the bee and of the wasp,
as the ' mechanical ' forces of the inorganic world.

CHAPTER II

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION

To manifest itself in action is not a peculiarity distinctive
of life ; it is a character common to all known existence.
The whole universe is resolvable into motion, that is,
into action ; it is dynamic, and no ' being,' no static
existence, is discoverable. There is in this respect no
distinction between the inorganic and the organic, the
living and the non-living, the animate and the inanimate.

Those distinctions are not grossly apparent, and were
not primitively drawn by human thought ; they are a
matter of interpretation. Both the moon and my friend
Jones appear to me as extended solid bodies which move ;
I ascribe the movements of Jones to certain powers and
dispositions which are not directly observable ; and I
ascribe the movements of the moon likewise to certain
powers and dispositions which are not directly observable.
The movements of living objects, like those of inorganic
objects, take place in relation to external conditions ;
both are reactions to that relation.

It is not until we come to analyse the way in
which organic and inorganic objects move that distinc-
tive differences become apparent. Those differences are
marked and manifest, so that scarcely any observer,
whether scientific or no, ever commits the mistake of
confounding a living with an inorganic object. But,
strangely enough, when it comes to defining, or even
roughly describing, those differences, human thought has
invariably entered into a region of the utmost confusion,

37

38 PSYCHE'S LAMP

vagueness, and incongruity, substituting theories and
interpretations of the causes of those differences for the
observable facts. While primitively it failed to draw
any clear distinction between the two kinds of reaction,
it would appear to have become so impressed with the
magnitude of the difference as to consider that it could
only be accounted for by supposing it to be due to some
totally different principle, which is the cause of the
movements of living objects and which is entirely absent
from inorganic objects. Indeed, some have thought one
additional principle insufficient to account for the actions
of living objects, and have accordingly postulated two,
one to discharge their physiological functions and the
other those of their consciousness, a vegetative soul or
vital force, and a cogitative soul or mind. The supposition,
once made, has given rise to a whole maze of new puzzles,
as for instance : How does that entirely different principle
postulated for the purpose of moving living objects come
to perform by a generatio equivoca its function at all ;
how do I come to move my arm ? " That I can stretch
forth my hand at all," was to Carlyle " an inscrutable,
God-revealing miracle." Can you form a clearer con-
ception of why a stone falls to the ground ? Is there
anything less mysterious in the one movement than
in the other ? Of the two, the movements of my hand in
relation to desires of which I am aware appear to me
rather less mysterious than the movements of the stone
in relation to nothing whatever of which I am aware.

Setting aside, however, for the present, all theories
as to the causes of the differences between inorganic and
living reactions, beyond the postulate that every reaction,
whether inorganic or living, is the manifestation of a
disposition to react in that particular way, let us consider
the much more neglected question as to what those
differences actually are.

The reactions of inorganic objects take place in a manner
which is so rigidly invariable that it is mathematically

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 39

calculable when the physical circumstances are known.
The disposition to which each of those reactions is due
is only manifested directly by the reaction itself, and
never indirectly by other reactions which may be inter-
preted as modified manifestations of the same disposition
tending to promote its operation. The stone tends to
fall towards the centre of the earth, salt has an affinity
for water ; but the only indications of those dispositions
are the facts that stones do fall towards the centre of the
earth, and that salt in the presence of moisture absorbs
it. The stone does not circumvent obstacles in order to
fall to the ground, salt does not seek water or in any way
resist desiccation.

The reactions of living beings, on the other hand, are
very much more variable than those of inorganic objects.
They are only approximately predicable. Their dis-
position to react in given conditions in a certain way
is, moreover, manifested not merely by the reaction
itself, but by a series and variety of reactions which can
be perceived to be conducive to the operation of that
disposition and to the avoidance of conditions unfavourable
to that operation. They seek and shun things by varied
modifications of their reactions, they circumvent and
overcome obstacles.

If I place a burning candle under a glass bell, its flame
will gradually die out as the oxygen becomes exhausted
or I pump it out. If instead of a candle I place a living
creature under the bell, the same thing will happen. Both
the flame of the candle and the flame of life require oxygen,
and absorb it eagerly. But that need is, in the living
organisms, manifested by other reactions besides the
mere absorption of oxygen. Some organisms at the very
bottom of the scale of life, the rotifer animalcules, will,
when placed under the air-pump, take quite effectual
steps to protect themselves. They will enclose themselves
in a varnish-like substance which they secrete, and which
enables them to retain a sufficient amount of oxygen

40 PSYCHE'S LAMP

and moisture to maintain their metabolism for a time.
If I place a sparrow under the bell of the air-pump it will,
as the supply of oxygen fails, show unmistakable signs
of uneasiness ; it will make desperate, though ineffectual,
efforts to get away, to get at the oxygen outside. If a
trap-door be contrived in the bell of the air-pump, it may,
in its indiscriminate efforts, hit upon the way of escape.
A mouse under like circumstances will almost certainly
succeed in finding its way to safety.

We cannot very well continue our investigation by
placing a human being under the bell of our air-pump,
but we can consider his behaviour in a quite similar
situation. Suppose our human subject to be a passenger
on an ocean steamer. Suddenly the steamer strikes a
rock or an iceberg, and presently begins to settle at the
bows. The event strongly affects the man just as the
failure of oxygen affected the sparrow and the mouse ;
but there is here this further difference : there is for
the moment no actual failure of oxygen, but the man
foresees that there is an imminent danger of a failure of
oxygen, of asphyxia, of drowning. He forestalls the event,
and he sets about taking various elaborate steps, such as
helping to lower a boat, providing for a supply of food,
keeping a look-out for a passing ship, setting up a signal,
and so forth, to counter the menace.

The reactions of the candle-flame, of the living animals,
of the man, are, ultimately analysed, manifestations of
an appetence, need, or affinity for oxygen. But, while
that need or appetence gives rise in the living beings
to more or less elaborate, more or less effectual varieties
of reactions, manifestly connected with that appetence,
the flame of the candle combines with oxygen and dies
as the supply of it fails, but does nothing else that is
relevant.

The nature of that difference is the same whatever
kind of organic or inorganic reaction we consider.

We are able to construct amazing machines which not

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 41

only serve a definite purpose, perform definite acts, but
go through the successive steps of a complex performance
in view of an ultimate result ; nay, which actually cope
with the event of an occasional failure, adjust themselves
to accidental circumstances. But there is no parallel
between those machines imagine them to be a thousand
times more wonderful and efficient than they are and
an organic reaction. For all the purposes, however
devious, which the machine fulfils are purposes which
have been put into the structure of the machine by
ourselves. They are not ulterior purposes of the machine,
but of ourselves who made it. And however wonderful
a machine may be, we can be quite sure that all the
purposes it appears to manifest and the variety of situations
with which it is capable of coping have, every one of
them, been foreseen, not by . the machine, but by the
machine-maker ; and in so far as they represent means
to ends, those ends are not at all those of the machine,
but of the maker of the machine. A machine is merely
a prolongation of human action.

So likewise the same distinctive difference between
inorganic action and that of living organisms holds good
of the most primitive and rudimentary acts of the latter
as of the most elaborate, of any of those reactions in
living organisms which we speak of a? physiological as
of the most acute or the most idealistic behaviour of a
human being. In the crude example which we considered
that character was exhibited in a much more marked
and effectual form by the rotifer, a primitive unicellular
organism corresponding to the cells which compose the
organs of higher organisms, than by the bird or by the
mammal.

Physiological science aims at explaining all the operations
performed by the various organs and tissues of the body
in terms of our knowledge of physical and chemical
processes. All physiological explanation consists in such
a subsumption, and to that aim and method is due the

42 PSYCHE'S LAMP

enormous extension in our knowledge of physiological
function. But great as that development has been, and
elaborate as are now our data concerning every observable
physiological operation of the organism, it so happens
that in no single instance has any physiological function
been entirely reduced to terms of purely physical and
chemical actions. Even simple processes which, on the
face of them, seemed quite susceptible of a complete
physical description, and were thought to have been so
accounted for, are found on further investigation to
involve factors not subsumable under ordinary physical
laws. The ascent of sap in the vessels of plants, for
instance, is seemingly quite intelligible by taking into
account the suction produced by evaporation in the
leaves, the pressure in turgid roots, and the capillary
forces ; but it is found to be carried out mainly by con-
tractions of the cell- walls of the vessels. Absorption
through the walls of intestinal and other cells appears
to be a straight-out case of osmosis through a membrane ;
but the process is not governed by the laws of osmosis,
but by a selective action exercised by each cell ; the cells
are not fed, they feed themselves. No case of reduction
of physiological function to physical terms has been
discovered. That circumstance might, of course, be pure
coincidence ; and we should have no right, considering
the complexity of organic action, to taunt physiological
science with the fact, and to say that because no physio-
logical operation has been so analysed, it can therefore
never be so analysed. But the position is somewhat
different when we observe that the residuum of
mechanically unexplained physiological action presents
precisely that character which is peculiar to organic
action and which distinguishes all the reactions of living
things from those of inorganic objects.

We are not, then, to set down physiological action
with mechanical action under one head, and ' mental '
action under another, but inorganic action under one,

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 43

and both physiological and mental under another ; for
there is precisely the same distinction between the
physiological and the mechanical type as there is between
the latter and the mental type of behaviour. So far as
respects that distinction between mechanical and non-
mechanical, the line of demarcation is not between mental
and physiological, but between living and non-living ;
and that other line of demarcation which we choose to
draw between physiological performances, biochemical
reactions, and conduct muscularly exteriorized, is quite
arbitrary and unjustified by the facts. The one and
the other order of reactions are distinguished from
mechanical processes by the same differences.

Those differences are quite definite, but our ways of
conceiving and describing them are not.

The description which first presents itself to our mind
is to say that organic reactions are purposive, and inorganic
reactions are not. When putting the matter in that way
we are applying to all organic actions the terms of a very
special form of our own action, and one, moreover, which
we have interpreted inaccurately. We are not actuated
by purposes, we are actuated by impulses. To have an
ideal end in view is only one way, one very special method,
of satisfying our impulses. We interpret by means of
our intellect, and in doing so our intellect, which is itself
an instrument of our impulses, imports into the inter-
pretation its own mode of operation as an instrument,
in the form of an ideal end. And the same intellectual
operation will lead us to describe the reactions of the
plant-cell of the protozoon as ' purposive,' and will lead
us to regard every efficient cause as a final cause. But
that importation of our intellectual method into every
mode of action is manifestly fallacious ; for what is meant
by the purposive method is to have ' a purpose in view,'
and not only can we not suppose the plant-cell, the
infusorian to have ' a purpose in view,' but in the majority
of our own actions we ourselves have no ' purpose in

44 PSYCHE'S LAMP

view.' And when we do, that purpose is not at all the
efficient cause of our actions, but a very subsidiary mode
of obtaining the means of satisfaction of impulses which
have no ' purpose in view.' That extension of a concept
derived from a special mode of action to all action leads
inevitably to confusing inconsistencies. For it leads us
to regard all those organic reactions which are exactly
similar to those of our actions that make use of an intellec-
tual purpose as ' purposive,' while we are at the same time
compelled to declare that they have no purpose in view.

In order to express that peculiarly self-contradictory
conception we have invented the words ' adaptation,'
' adapted,' ' adaptive.' Those words are an obvious
subterfuge to shuffle out of the incongruous conception
of a ' purposive ' action that has no purpose in view.
They are, however regarded, ambiguous. We describe
the actions of a living organism as being ' adapted.'
' Adapted ' to what ? ' To external circumstances ' is
the usual answer. But ' adapted to external circum-
stances ' means nothing at all unless certain needs,
requirements, interests, impulses of the organism which
adapts itself, be postulated. The reactions of a living
organism are not adapted to external circumstances only,
but to the actuating impulses of the organism. What is
called adaptation is the adjustment of the reaction of
the organism to both terms, to the external circumstances
and to its own impulse and disposition.

Animals occasionally act foolishly, and so do even
human beings ; their actions are not adapted at all. The
statement is therefore modified by saying that they are
' adaptive,' that they tend, albeit ineffectually, to become
adapted. But some acts are not even adaptive the
flight of the moth into the flame, for instance, the roar
of the hungry lion, the yapping of the terrier at a rabbit.

The fact is that the teleological character which we
introduce into all our descriptions of organic reactions
is not a fundamental, original and innate character of

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 45

the reactions of life. It is true that an enormous majority
of those reactions do manifest that relation of means
to an end, and that numberless structural organs and
complex functions are permanent and elaborate devices
to promote by an intricate apparatus of means the ends
of life in the individual and in the race. But those organs,
those functions, and the whole teleological operation of
organic reaction, are the result of a long process of de-
velopment. That teleological operation is the effect of
a much simpler mode of action out of which it has grown.
That mode of action which characterizes organic as opposed
to inorganic reactions is not the power of adaptation, but
the power of modification.

If we study the behaviour of the simpler organisms
we at once perceive that their power of adaptation simply
means the power of altering their behaviour. If an
infusorian freely swimming in a microscopic aquarium
comes upon an obstacle, such as the glass wall of the
vessel, it recedes and alters its direction by a small angle ;
if once more it collides with the obstacle, its direction
is again modified by a few degrees, until by successive
repetitions of the process it comes to be reversed. Such
a manoeuvre is typical of the procedure of all organic
reactions. It is what has been aptly called by Lloyd-
Morgan the process of Trial and Error. If infusorians or
other micro-organisms are placed on a glass plate the
various parts of which are heated to varying degrees of
temperature, the organisms will ultimately be found to
be collected in that portion of the plate which offers the
most suitable temperature for their development, the
' optimum temperature,' as it is called. That result is
a definite adaptation, but if we observe the manner in
which it is brought about we shall find that it is exactly
similar to that followed by the infusorian when colliding
with an obstacle. Each infusorian alters the direction of
its motion whenever it passes from a more comfortable to
a less comfortable temperature, until all are ultimately

46 PSYCHE'S LAMP

collected in the region of optimum temperature. There
is, it may be urged, a certain amount of adaptive action
in the fact that conditions which are injurious produce a
reaction different from those which are favourable. But
that distinction is, as we shall see, a necessary consequence
of the variability of reaction, for injurious conditions
cause a negative variation of those activities upon which
they act injuriously, while favourable conditions stimulate
them.

The teleological power of adaptability is, then, a
derivative product of the more elementary power of
modification. And it is this power of modifying their
reactions which constitutes the essential distinction
between the mode of action of living organisms and that
of inorganic systems.

Now there is a very good reason why living organisms
have the power of modifying their reactions and inorganic
systems have not. In living organisms any reaction can
be repeated over and over again by the same reacting
system, while no reaction can ever be repeated a second
time by the same inorganic system, for the latter is, so
far as the particular reaction is concerned, completely
destroyed by every reaction in which it takes part.

The cause of the actions of inorganic objects is not
known. Scientists to-day call it ' energy.' That is only
a word which means ' action,' or ' activity,' and adds
nothing to our knowledge of the fact that all objects act
and move. Since it is the ultimate fact of analysis,
corresponding to the old categories of ' being ' or ' sub-
stance,' it cannot be explained in terms of an ulterior
concept.

Although physical science cannot explain the nature of
energy, it has demonstrated a very important fact con-
cerning it, and illustrated some of the most abstract
conceptions of Aristotelian metaphysics. Energy is a
fixed quantity that can be measured. It can exist in
a latent, potential state, and it can be liberated and act.

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 47

The expression ' potential energy ' is, like much of
the phraseology of science, highly disputable. Physical
investigators have shed a flood of light on metaphysical
conceptions while often displaying a pathetic simplicity
in regard to metaphysical precision. ' Potential energy '
is tantamount to ' inactive activity/ which is an absurd
contradiction in terms. But ' potential energy ' is, in
fact, not inactive at all. It is abundantly employed in
the maintenance of the configuration of the system which
is supposed to ' contain ' it in a latent state. Energy
is ' stored ' within a system by being employed in holding
together the configuration, the form of that system.
The ' potential energy ' of a stone on a cliff, of a head
of water, of a Leyden jar, of a complex molecule, is active
in the stresses, masses, electric charges, chemical affinities,
attractions, represented by the positional relation of the
parts of those configurations. And those stresses, masses,
etc., those apparently static qualities of material objects,
are analysable into actual movements. The ' latent ' or
' potential ' state differs only from the active or ' kinetic '
in that its operation is circumscribed within the limits
of a system theoretically isolated from the rest of the
universe. The energy which is potential in the lump of
iron is kinetic in its molecules ; that which is potential
in its molecules is kinetic in its atoms, and so forth. So
that the opposition between potential and kinetic energy
is only relative.

The concepts ' potential,' ' power,' ' disposition,' ' ten-
dency,' etc. to which may be added those represented
by the words ' agent,' ' doer,' and the like belong to
the category oijorm. The energy of the physicist remains
unchanging in quantity ; the manner in which that
energy is distributed and circumscribed within a ' thing,'
a given system of energy, a given ' agent,' is the form of
that energy. It is that form alone which is significant,
which constitutes differences, qualities. Energy, being
regarded as a uniform unchanging quantity, can have no

48 PSYCHE'S LAMP

values because there are in it no differences. Destroy
the form, you destroy the ' thing,' the object, the piece
of coal, the molecule, the atom, and convert it into kinetic
energy, into action. We can break up most objects into
gaseous molecules ; by more powerful agencies those
molecules can in turn be broken up until nothing massive
and formed remains. The energy which by its disposition
constituted the system is redistributed into new configura-
tions. The ' thing ' is completely converted into action.

Whenever a configuration of potential energy is trans-
formed into kinetic energy, that configuration is destroyed.
Every system of energy which reacts comes to an end
in that reaction ; the reaction cannot be repeated by
the same configuration. When a stone falls from a cliff,
the configuration, stone-earth-ether, is destroyed. The
reaction can only be repeated by building up the con-
figuration anew, that is, by carrying the stone back to
the top of the cliff. A configuration of energy does not,
of course, correspond to what we call an object ; the latter
being a purely arbitrary delimitation effected in relation
to our own uses and actions. The sun, the stars, which
radiate heat and light into space, are thereby destroyed.
We never twice see the same sun, the same star, but only
what is left of them after each reaction in which the
whole system giving rise to that reaction is consumed.
In the machines which we make the energy is supplied
by our winding them up, or providing them with fuel.

The same holds good of the chemical reactions of
molecular systems. When a salt reacts with an acid,
the salt and the acid are destroyed, and a new configuration
is formed. Radium is destroyed by giving off energy
and becoming converted into helium.

No inorganic system can react without its configuration,
its form being destroyed by that reaction ; and therefore
no reaction can ever be repeated by the same configuration
of energy, by the same ' agent.'

Those things which scientists speak of as electrons,

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 49

magnetons, atoms, molecules, multi-molecules, are systems
of energy, of latent power. The simpler the constitution
of those systems, the stronger the bonds by which the
energy is tied within them ; the more complex the
aggregate, the weaker the bonds, the more labile and
unstable the configuration of energy. Simple substances,
like hydrogen, are only broken up under very special
conditions, as in the photosphere of the sun where the
spectroscope shows us the presence of hydrogen resolved
into single atoms, proto-hydrogen. ' Elements ' of com-
plex structure, of high atomic weight, such as uranium,
thorium, radium, are comparatively unstable, and are
constantly being broken down with the release of energy.
Still more complex aggregates, such as the relatively huge
organic molecules, are in a state of unstable equilibrium,
and readily become transformed, giving forth energy.
Those substances called colloids are composed of a number
of molecules loosely united into multi-molecules ; a portion
of their energy is constantly and slowly active, and, owing
to the extreme variety of affinities of the carbon atom,
an enormous diversity of reactions and changes can
proceed simultaneously within the system.

Regarded from a purely chemico-physical point of view,
living systems of energy are colloids of the highest degree
of complexity, instability and diversity of reactions.
Those conditions give rise to entirely new possibilities.
Their reactions consist, like all other chemical reactions,
in the liberation of kinetic energy derived from the destruc-
tion of the internal configuration in which that energy
was potential. But only a portion of the system is thus
broken down in every reaction. The large reserves of
energy which are maintained in those portions of the
system which do not take direct part in the reaction are
employed in simultaneous reactions. As a result of those
correlated reactions the configuration destroyed by each
reaction is built up anew from the reserve energy of the
system, and from energy absorbed from the surrounding

4

50 PSYCHE'S LAMP

world ; the system of potential energy winds itself up as
fast as it runs down ; it stokes itself, feeds. Thus the
form, the configuration of the system, is maintained
throughout the stream of changes. What cannot take
place in any other physical or chemical system in the
world can consequently take place here : a reaction can
be repeated over and over again by the same configuration
of energy.

From that circumstance momentous consequences follow.
The configuration which is rebuilt after its destruction
in a reaction is never exactly the same as it was before ;
it is modified by the reaction. The second reaction will
therefore differ from the first. If the first reaction has
produced an effect favourable to the activity of the
configuration of energy involved in that reaction, the
subsequent reaction will be more powerful than the first.
If, on the contrary, the effect of the first reaction has
been unfavourable to the configuration which produced
it, the activity of the latter will necessarily be diminished
on a repetition of the reaction. By repetition of the
process a continuous and increasing modification in the
reaction takes place. The original reaction may become
very much prompter and intensified, or it may disappear
altogether. The system will not react as it did at first ;
it will react in some other way. Its reaction has become
modified. And by the elimination of reactions which
lessen the power of the system to rebuild the destroyed
configuration, its reaction will become adapted.

In our own experience the concomitant of a modification
in our reactions is a feeling, a feeling of comfort or dis-
comfort, of pleasure or pain. Feelings, pleasure and pain,
do not cause us to act, they are not the motive power
of our actions, but they cause us to modify our actions.

Human thought has for ages made a variety of sup-
positions to account for the differences in behaviour of
living beings and inorganic objects. The most prevalent
has been that of a separate principle, either confined to

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 51

human beings (the soul), or common to all living things
(the vital force). That solution by means of a special
' virtue,' or deus ex machina, is, of course, the easiest.
It costs nothing ; and its value as an explanation is
exactly proportional to its intellectual cost. But, directly
connected with its complete impotence to explain any-
thing, is the prolific power it possesses of bringing into
existence teeming multitudes of insoluble riddles, incon-
gruities and flat self-contradictions, so that a very large
proportion of the pseudo-problems of metaphysics is the
direct progeny of that felicitous solution. That unsatis-
factory state of things has accordingly caused many at
various times to put forward the opposite supposition,
namely, that the cause of the actions of living beings,
including men and women, is the same as the cause of
the actions of inorganic objects.

That rival theory has assumed two main forms. Some,
deluded by their opponents' own conception of matter,
have professed to regard feelings as products or effects
of the movements of material particles, much to the
amusement of those who moved their arms by means
of their thoughts. Some Greek thinkers, such as the
philosophers of the Eleatic school, Parmenides, and later
Empedocles, who lived at a time when epistemological
distinctions were still somewhat hazy, and, accordingly,
the Cartesian epistemological misconception of dualism had
not yet brought confusion on human thought, also held
the view that all activities, whether organic or inorganic,
have a common cause. And in order to do so consistently,
they and those who have followed them felt themselves
compelled to assume that inorganic objects have feelings.

That assumption is not in accordance with our own
psychological experience. For feeling in ourselves only
accompanies a modification in our activity, and the
activity of inorganic objects is never modified. We only
experience a feeling when a change in the relation of our
activities to those of the surrounding world calls for a

52 PSYCHE'S LAMP

change in our mode of action. Where no such change
is called for, when our surroundings are perfectly ' normal '
and habitual, so that we react to them by well-established
and unmodified reactions, those reactions take place
without being accompanied by feeling, ' automatically '
and unconsciously. The principle of Hobbes, the ' Law
of relativity,' as it is called, " Idem semper sentire et non
sentire ad idem recidunt," is one of the best established
principles of psychology. It has been disputed, by
William James, for instance, who calls it a ' superstition,'
and suggests that one might have the same old pain
throughout eternity. The Christian Fathers were better
psychologists ; they recognized the necessity of invoking
a miracle in order to make possible the pains of eternal
punishment. All feeling is a change from the normal
equilibrium. When that equilibrium is disturbed two
things may happen : the organism may adapt itself to
the new conditions, or it may fail to adapt itself. In the
first case those conditions become in turn ' normal ' and
cease to exist as feeling ; in the second the feeling organism
itself ceases to exist. Innumerable activities take place
in us unaccompanied by any feeling so long as the con-
ditions of their operation remain unchanged ; but let a
change take place in those conditions of our physiological
and automatic activity, and at once a lively feeling of
discomfort is experienced.

Feeling is in ourselves entirely restricted to a very
limited aspect of our activity. We have seen that neither
the cause of our actions nor the end to which they are
directed is represented in our consciousness. That con-
sciousness is exclusively confined to the intervening
process of employing means towards the satisfaction of
the impulses which bring about our actions. ' Means/
' purposes ' are nothing else than the cognitive method of
modifying our reactions. That method constitutes an
abbreviation of, and an improvement on, that of modifi-
cation by trial and error under the guidance of pure feeling

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 53

of comfort or discomfort. It is only in the face of a
situation that is new that the operation of that intercalated
process of instrumentality is called for. Consciousness,
whether cognitive or affective, is only associated with
such a change in the conditions of our activities as requires
a modification of those activities. Where those conditions
contain no element of novelty they are dealt with un-
consciously and anaesthetically by the operation of our
established reactions.

Suppose that we do assume that the cause of the
activities of inorganic objects is exactly similar to that
of our own, and that we can therefore analyse those
actions psychologically on the analogy of our own feelings
in just the same way as we analyse the behaviour of living
things. If we apply the analogy accurately, we shall not
be able to introduce any feeling into the transaction.
For feeling does not exist in ourselves except as the con-
comitant of modification of reaction ; and no inorganic
reaction ever is or ever can be modified, because the
system of energy that gives rise to it is completely destroyed
in the reaction itself. Feeling only occurs in the interval
between the coming into operation of an unconscious
latent impulse at the call of an occasion for that operation,
and the consummation of that impulse ; in inorganic
reactions there is no such interval. There is no interval
between the operation of a cause, the contact of a reagent,
for instance, and the effect or reaction which is brought
about. There is no intercalated process between cause
and effect ; there are no instrumental purposes, no means,
in the operation of inorganic energy. Ascribe consciousness
to the ' affinity ' of hydrogen for oxygen, conceive it to
be a want, a desire, that consciousness will not come into
being except in the presence of oxygen, and it will cease
to be as the reaction is effected, that is to say, at the same
moment. There is no reaction-time in inorganic processes ;
where a reaction appears to occupy a certain time, that is
merely due to its successive diffusion to various parts ;

54 PSYCHE'S LAMP

the reaction is extended in space but not protended in
time. In ourselves every conscious process is protended
in time, it must last an appreciable time in order to be
conscious at all. No conscious process known in our
experience could take place under the conditions of
inorganic reaction.

Those, then, who have supposed that if the cause of
inorganic reactions is of the same nature as that of the
reactions of living organisms, feeling must be postulated
to be a concomitant of the former, were mistaken, and
were misled by an insufficient knowledge of the conditions
of our own psychic experience. On the analogy of our
own psychology no such assumption is justified.

The movements of the inorganic world are said to
' obey ' certain physical and chemical ' laws.' The ex-
pression is, of course, highly metaphorical. What any
scientist understands to-day by that expression is that
the activities manifested by material bodies are observed
to conform invariably to certain formulas which we have
been able to induce from the observation of those activities,
and which are, doubtless, partial aspects of wider uni-
formities. But when the phrase ' to obey a natural law '
first came into use in the seventeenth century it was
intended to have a pious connotation. It was deliberately
meant to suggest that material bodies actually ' obeyed '
a ' law ' imposed upon them by the fiat of an Almighty
Creator. That ' obedience ' was supposed to convey a
subtle implication of some sort of homage, of worship,
of acknowledgment of supremacy offered by creation to
its Maker. Conformity to natural law, that is, mechanism,
was by our pious forefathers made a subject of religious
edification ; that mode of interpretation being designed
to rob the uniformity of mechanical processes of the
lurking danger arising from the antithesis to the super-
natural and miraculous. It was an animistic metaphor.

Instead of using that animistic metaphor, we might
with equal propriety say that physical activities are

ORGANIC AND INORGANIC ACTION 55

manifestations of impulses to act in certain ways. The
latter metaphor would be considerably more accurate as
a statement of fact free from assumption ; for all that
we directly know is that material objects act, and that
activity can only be conceived as the manifestation of
some inherent disposition to act. But a disposition to
act does not imply feeling, which is only found in con-
junction with the modification of action. No modification
can take place in the activity of inorganic systems, which
is arrested and at an end in the instant that their measured
quantity of energy is balanced ; no reserve of energy can
permit of persistence in the operation of the tendency.
Only by the conative disposition of a living organism,
which is not destroyed by its reaction, which renews
itself, and can repeat, modify, its operation, can experience
be accumulated and applied. In the delicate rhythmic
equilibrium of that permanent instability of living matter
were probably offered for the first time the necessary
conditions of consciousness, the possibilities of feeling.

CHAPTER III

FEELING AND COGNITION

IT is on presentations, sensory or conceptual, on thought,
on cognitive objects and processes, that our consciousness
is focused. But another form of conscious experience
much more fundamental than cognition, though thrust
by it into the penumbra of our consciousness, is invariably
present pure feeling, affective feeling.

There is no such thing as knowledge, as cognition pure
and simple ; every cognition is embedded in a matrix
of affective feeling. Whenever an object, an event, is
present to the mind, through the senses or in thought,
whenever it is cognized, there is much more in that
experience than the mere fact of cognition, the mere fact
that the object is apprehended as being such. You
perceive a material object, say, to be big, hard, of a par-
ticular form and colour. Those features, whatever your
theory of perception, whatever translation they may
undergo in passing through your sensual means of investi-
gation, are counted by you as characters of the object
itself, characters of it, in truth, as the object of your
action. But that object in addition strikes you as inter-
esting or uninteresting, pleasant or unpleasant, beautiful
or ugly ; it makes on you an impression over and above
those features which you register as its characters. And,
as a matter of fact, you will not trouble to note the first
set of qualities at all distinctly and minutely unless the
object first makes its appeal to you by virtue of some
interest, of some use, of some pleasantness or danger,

56

FEELING AND COGNITION 57

which in some way affects you, and directs your attention
to it and to those descriptive characters which you note.
The two sets of adjectives differ radically in their purport.
The interestingness, the usefulness, the pleasantness, the
beauty of the object are not regarded by you as intrinsic
qualities of the object, like its shape and colour ; they are
expressions of values which the object bears in relation
to certain needs, desires, interests, tastes, likes and dis-
likes, which constitute your attitude towards it. The
first set of qualities is cognitive, the second affective.

A fact is never merely registered, it commoves and
colours our feelings. The experience which is utterly
drab, trivial, blank and meaningless, is by that very
insipidity framed in its particular feeling-tone.

The fact is disguised and obscured in the complexity
of our experience. Countless sense-impressions pour in
upon us every second, and we should in most instances
be at a loss to assign an affective value to those experiences
which seem to be thrust upon us without our asking.

The eye it cannot choose but see,

We cannot bid the ear be still,
Our bodies feel where'er they be.

Against or with our will.

WORDSWORTH.

It appears to us that we are essentially experiencing,
sentient beings continuously subjected from all quarters
to a somewhat tedious bombardment of sensations, most
of which are of little interest to us and have some trouble
in attracting our attention at all, in making us observant.
They are to us neither painful nor pleasant, beautiful
or ugly. But the illusion for such it is of a bombard-
ment by indifferent sensations is the effect of a highly
elaborated development of sense organs which have become
posted all about our organism to keep watch not at all
for purposes of idle curiosity, but in view of issues of
life and death over the environment. And, irrelevant
as much of the information appears to be which those

58 PSYCHE'S LAMP

watchful sentinels transmit, we, as a matter of fact,
only take account of just those sensory data which, in
respect of some vital interest or present purpose, are
significant. In order to engage our attention at all, in
order to be perceived, they must possess that affective
value, a relation of some kind to what, for the present,
we deem our interest. No sensation enters our conscious-
ness except by virtue of its affective value. So far as
sensory experience goes, the rolling landscape of field and
sky amid which you are disporting yourself is much the
same for you, for the ploughman who is leading his team
on yonder hill, for his horses, for your dog, and for those
grazing sheep. Sense-organs are virtually identical in all
those mammals ; but the noted sensations, the sensory
bombardment, differs nevertheless hugely in you, the
ploughing peasant, the dog, the horses, the sheep. From
the world of sensation, that only is abstracted by each
which has value in terms of active interests. Originally
it is only in view of that interest, in view of a purpose
useful to us, of an impulse that urges us, that the entire
apparatus of sense-organs, of cognition, that seems to
thrust upon us a multitude of indifferent sensations has
come into being at all, and developed into its present
illusory form.

When we are adopting a scientific attitude, when of
set purpose we apply ourselves to investigate and describe
an object, as part, say, of an imposed task, we seem
concerned purely with the quale of the thing, our attitude
is objective and realistic. But that very attitude assigns
to the object of our inquiry a new value ; our abstract,
disinterested, detached investigation, our strenuous effort
to eliminate the ' personal equation/ to be ' objective,'
is inspired by desire for accurate truth ; and the passion
for truth is, after all, a passion. The quale of our object
becomes itself an affective value, a significance in terms
of our desire, our purpose, our conation.

When you are idly and helplessly lying in a bed of

FEELING AND COGNITION 59

convalescence, the pattern of the wall-paper, the stains
of the ceiling, which you never before noticed, obtrude
themselves upon you with such annoying insistence only
by virtue of your shrinking from the blank of your
existence, of your desire for some exercise and interest ;
the rows of conventional flowers become exasperating
from the penury of satisfaction which they afford to those
desires that are aroused in you by returning strength.

Pure cognitive experience does not exist ; cognition
is always a cognito-affective experience. It consists of
a presented object and of the affective value of that
object ; of knowledge, and of the affective significance
to the organisms of that knowledge.

Every presentation is a feeling though every feeling
is not a presentation. In sensory perception the complex
object presented, and compounded not only of the actual
sensations, but also of memories and apperceptions which
make up its significance, has an affective value of its
own apart from that of the sensations which present it.
But those sensations themselves are feelings, and, as
feelings, have their own affective value. Hence many
untrained thinkers, and also some trained and professed
thinkers, experience some difficulty in drawing a clear
distinction between the cognitive element of presentation
and the affective one of pure feeling, between a pain, say,
and a sensation. We commonly speak of a ' sensation
of pain.' The fact is that at that primordial level the
cognitive and affective elements are so intimately blended
as to coalesce. A cognitive sensation, such as that which
you experience when cautiously exploring the temperature
of the handle of a kettle, will pass by a rapid transition
into a sharp pain if you grasp the handle and find it to
be too hot. A sensation is, in fact, nothing else than an
affective feeling thus cautiously and tentatively put to
an exploratory use ; it is a feeling adapted to cognitive
and presentative purposes. And, as such, it may rise
to such affective intensity that its presentational function

60 PSYCHE'S LAMP

is disregarded and obliterated in the urgency of the
affective commotion. The most delicate discriminating
sensation is as much a feeling as a burn, or a blow on the
head ; it is only in the use that the exploratory feeling
of sensation is put to that the distinction lies. To exercise
its cognitive function the feeling must be so attenuated,
must by the keenness of its search so forestall actual
pain, that no affective value of its own shall interfere
with the cognitive operation. All cognition, from sensation
up to the highest functions of abstract thought, demands
that detachment of disinterestedness in the feeling through
which it is obtained ; its cognitive efficiency depends upon
the checking of its affective value by a cognitive effort.

Primitively all affection reduces itself to the feelings
of pleasantness and unpleasantness, pleasure and pain,
comfort and discomfort. Pleasure and pain physical
pleasure and pain, of course are the primary affections
of which all other feelings whatsoever, up to our highest
values, emotional, artistic, intellectual, or moral, are
derivatives. Common estimation rightly recognizes the
fundamental identity of two psychic states seemingly
very widely different a physical pain and a grief, the
pain of a burn and that of the loss of a beloved. (A
physical pain ! that is a very glaring contradiction ; as
if a pain could be physical, a feeling material !) The
physiological pain in a limb or a viscus is clearly the
obstruction of its function, the interference with its activity,
its partial destruction. The emotion of anguish caused by
a scrap of paper that brings the news of a ' Nevermore,'
is in exactly the same relation to the conations of our
conceptual being as the physiological pain caused by
scalding water to the conation of our dermal tissues.

The affective quality of experience shades off in intensity
from the extreme throes of agony to that faint affective
colouring which our surroundings cast upon us, which is
perhaps hardly noticed, and which seems to approach,
but never in reality reaches, a neutral state of indifference.

FEELING AND COGNITION 61

You may take no particular account of the impression
which the room into which you are shown produces upon
you, whether it is satisfying or offensive, cheerful or
depressing ; but to the sensory impression which it pro-
duces there corresponds a subtle affective tone which,
even more than the matter-of-fact features which you may
note, constitutes their effect upon you.

Language, being a descriptive, and therefore a purely
cognitive, symbolism, can never express feeling ; it can
at most, like all art, suggest it. A feeling that is named
is no longer a feeling, it is the presentation of a feeling,
a mere cognition. When feeling is overwhelming and
bursts into expression, our polished and refined instrument
of articulate diction breaks down into inarticulate ejacula-
tions, into the primitive cries and yells of the beast.
Hence language is necessarily very meagre in its nomen-
clature of affective states, in contrast with the subtlety
and elaboration of its cognitive distinctions. It has names
only for affective states raised to the superlative degree
pain, anger, surprise, fear, disgust, and so forth. Our
ordinary affective states are far too delicate and subtle
to be distinguished by such coarse labels. It is the
province of art to convey by suggestive means an affective
colouring which is not to be set down in the language
of scientific description.

And our thought which is bound down to the symbolism
of language is thereby rendered unobservant of our own
feelings, so that we remain for the most part incognizant
of them unless they force themselves upon us by rising
to an unusual pitch. They colour our life, our moods,
and shape our activity without being taken note of by
our cognitive word-consciousness ; and we marvel at
the artist when he reveals to us our own unnoticed
feelings.

All feeling, whether a * physical ' feeling or an ineffable
shade of emotional significance, is the effect of whatever
acts upon us. Upon ' us ' that is to say, upon our

62 PSYCHE'S LAMP

own activities, our impulses and dispositions to activity.
It is the modification of those dispositions, their satisfaction
and stimulation, their checking and dissatisfaction, the
diversified selective action of all influences ' physical ' or
presentative upon the total mass of the conative ten-
dencies which constitute our being as a source of action.
Crude physiological pain intermingled with sensation itself,
if crude primary organic needs are at stake ; sublimated
emotional values if it is those elaborately cultivated
tastes that our culture has created, which are involved ;
interests which in a larger or smaller measure arrest our
attention if cognition itself is our purpose of the moment.
The affective colouring of any experience is the chord
which that experience strikes on the manifold tendencies
of our being. As the conative tendencies involved become
more abstract, more far-reaching in their glance before
and after, more complex in their combinations, appercep-
tions and associations, affective values become correspond-
ingly diversified and sublimated. There is much similarity
between one crude physiological pain and another, between
the pain of a stab, say, or that of a scald ; the exact savour
and quality of an emotional value, of the feeling which
a landscape, a book, a man, a political event, a situation,
awakens in us, how it strikes us, faintly or forcibly,
according to the directness of our interest in it, is a
complex, elusive, ineffable feeling-tone, which calls for
the utmost acuteness of psychological observation to
seize and analyse, which it is the peculiar task of the
deftest art to render and suggest. But all, from the
crudest pain to violent or faint emotion and sentimental
colouring of experience, are affections of our conative
dispositions.

An affection, a feeling, an emotion, is, then, the ex-
periential obverse of those conative dispositions, their
mould, their form and pressure in consciousness, when
they are checked or intensified ; it is the stimulation
or obstruction of a conative tendency. That affective

FEELING AND COGNITION 68

value is the only value, is the only form in which a conative
tendency or disposition is represented in consciousness.
We do not know any conative tendency directly as such ;
that lies outside the sphere of consciousness. We only
know its imprint in feeling, in the experience of pleasure
or pain, in fhe variety of our affective states. And it
is in that sense that the world of affective values, of
emotions, is the truest world, and art the truest truth :
we deal there with the essentials and fundamentals of
our being.

Pure feeling, affective values, the breaking of an
obstructed conation into consciousness is genetically the
first aspect and element of consciousness, and is in truth
the only one of which all others are derivative. Conscious-
ness came into the world as pain. Feeling serves to guide
the activities of life. Conditions that are favourable to
its conative impulses are represented in consciousness by
a pleasurable feeling and existing activity is stimulated ;
conditions that are unfavourable to the activity of those
impulses are represented by a feeling of discomfort, of
pain, and existing activities are inhibited. Such is the
very simple mechanism of all living reaction. It is the
whole mechanism of the behaviour of living things, of
psychic action ; all the rest is superadded elaboration.
Feeling, pure feeling of comfort or discomfort, without
any element of cognition, without any apprehension of
an objective quality in the environment, is all that is
essentially necessary assuming any psychism to be
necessary to the operation of the conations of life, to
the modification of reaction. And, as a matter of fact,
that is all the psychism which, if we may judge of it by
their behaviour, is to be found in the simpler forms of
life. It is all the psychic mechanism of the human infant,
which is a purely affective being. Nor is the process
essentially different in our own life and behaviour ; all
the apparatus of our cognitive powers and experience,
sensations, concepts, thoughts, exists solely in the service

64 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of our impulses and of their conscious representation
in feeling.

Cognition, as distinguished from affection or pure
feeling, is not an essential, an indispensable element
in the process of life ; and consequently it is not a
primordial, original and innate feature of it. Cognition
is a luxury. All cognitive processes, from the simplest
form of sensation onwards, are an elaboration, an
improvement, an acquired character which has developed
out of non-cognitive forms of life and mind. They are,
in fact, modified feelings.

All our psychological science has grown from the point
of view of a cognitive, sensational and intellectualistic,
attitude. That inveterate bias has caused all psychological
problems to be approached from the starting-point of
cognitive processes, of sensation with Locke and the
sensationalists, of the pure intellect with Kant and the
intellectualists ; while the conative activities of living
beings were set aside as of secondary interest, and were
left to be dealt with by Professors of Virtue.

Considered from the purely psychological standpoint,
the assumption that cognition is the starting-point of
psychism is false. No cognition is ' given,' no cognitive
experience is thrust upon us. On the contrary, of the
myriad possibilities of experience that assail our organism
at every moment we sense nothing, we know nothing
but what we desire to know, what it interests us to know.
The mind is not a judge, comfortably seated, as it were,
in its judgment-seat, before whom passes an endless
procession of witnesses offering ' the testimony of the
senses.' It forcibly drags by its own exertions the witnesses
it requires into the limelight of consciousness.

If we consider the organism and the ambient universe
from a physical point of view, there is no agency in the
latter that does not in some manner affect the organism,
whether it be sensed or no. It matters not whether
that organism be a philosopher, an amoeba, or a plant ;

FEELING AND COGNITION 65

it is part of the physical universe, and we are bound
to assume that every ether-wave, every gravitational
force, every molecular disturbance, every molar motion in
that universe has, to a greater or a less degree, an inevitable
physical effect upon the organism as a physical system.
The revolutions of the moons of Jupiter affect the molecules
of my brain. Unless we set aside every physical conception,
every change and agency in the physical world must needs
have its repercussion in the organism. Of all those
physical effects on the organism what is represented in
sensation is but an innnitesimally small fraction. Our
sensations, our cognitions, far from being a representation,
a reflection as in a mirror, of the external universe, are
but an absurdly minute fragment of the impressions
which the external universe, all unknown to us, actually
makes upon our physiological beings. There are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
sensory cognition. We human beings, with our highly
elaborated sense-organs, our cunningly contrived eyes and
ears, and exploring hands, can actually sense but a few
miserable odd shreds of the physical influences which
incessantly ply our bodily structure. We are no more
omnisensing than we are omniscient. Cathodic rays pass
through and through our bodies, producing the most pro-
found physiological action, yet leave us sensorily incog-
nizant ; we stand by the side of a wireless telegraphic
apparatus which Herzian waves cause to sizzle furiously,
and we sense nothing ; we stand in the field of force of
a magnet that will stop our watch, and which does not
produce in us the slightest sensation. The range of our
sensation is as that of the visible spectrum compared
to the whole length of the solar spectrum a mere fraction.
Indeed, our sensory faculties are in many respects con-
siderably more reduced than those of the lower animals.
Our olfactory sense is degenerate and vestigial compared
to that of the dog ; our civilized vision is far less keen
than that of a savage or of a bird. Ants and bees react

5

66 PSYCHE'S LAMP

to waves of the spectrum which are quite unperceived by
us. The amoeba itself is sensitive to chemical changes
which to us are undiscernible ; myxomycetes respond to
gaseous emanations which we are unable to detect.

To suppose that all those unsensed physical actions,
and thousands more of which we have no inkling, impinge
on every molecule of our organism without producing
any effect at all upon the psychic aspect of that organism,
is quite impossible except on the most extreme dualistic
view of mental isolation. Unquestionably every one of
those physical impressions has its effect, deep and
momentous, upon our psychic activities. But that effect
is not sensory, is not cognitive. The actions of things
upon us is, as we said, represented by feeling, not by
presentative feeling necessarily, not by sensation. And
we know that many unsensed physical states of our
environment, atmospheric conditions and pressures, elec-
trical disturbances, do affect us in our moods, in the
general tone of our vitality and activity. It is hardly
to be doubted that the whole physical universe thus enters
causally into the determination of our activity, of our
behaviour, of our reactions, of our feelings ; that uncog-
nized influence of the whole physical universe is one set
of factors, wholly obscure to us, in our mental causation.
But so far as sensory cognition is concerned it is only
represented by a quite insignificant little bundle of
sensations.

Our sensory experience, then, is not by a long way
coextensive with the impression of the external world
upon our organism. It is not a mechanical reflection,
as in a mirror, of those impressions. It is but a very
small selection of those impressions, which are the same
for the lowest as for the highest organism. The impression
of an external agency and a sensation are two widely
different things ; and sensory experience is not something
impressed by the external world on our organs, something
' given/ but it is something picked out, seized, selected

FEELING AND COGNITION 67

by the organism out of the mass of impressions impinging
upon it.

If we trace the evolution of cognition backwards,
divesting it one by one of those elaborations which it
has assumed in the course of development, we shall first
witness the vanishing of general ideas, of conceptual
thought, of all re-presentation whatsoever. Cognition
will be reduced to direct sense-cognition. Sensation will
further simplify itself ; our organism no longer has eyes,
ears, olfactory organs, or tactile corpuscles. The differ-
entiation and discrimination of sensory impressions
become gradually less and less ; various amplitudes of
ether waves are no longer distinguished, nor the impact
of molecules from that of larger bodies. Ultimately the
issue of such a process of backward de-differentiation
would logically appear to be to reduce all the diversity
of our sensory experience to one vague wholly undiffer-
entiated sensory continuum, a sort of blended smell-taste-
sight-touch sensation. That apparently logical conclusion
is, however, wholly erroneous ; and it is only owing to
the failure of psychologists to grasp the nature of sensory
cognition that they are led to such an antinomy as the
notion of an ' undifferentiated sensation/ a flatly self-
contradictory conception, for sensation in its essence and
origin is a differentiation.

The backward limit of simplification of sensation is
not an ' undifferentiated sensory continuum/ but no
sensation at all. Sensation does not become undiffer-
entiated, but passes into a purely affective state in which
no element of cognition enters. The primitive organism
does not sense solidity, form, heat ; it feels satisfactions
and dissatisfactions, it cognizes nothing. As we descend
the psychological scale we do not come upon undiffer-
entiated sensation, but the cognitive element rapidly
dwindles, the affective element bulks more and more
as the chief, and ultimately the sole, constituent of
experience. In animals there is very little left of that

68 PSYCHE'S LAMP

contemplative, knowledge-acquiring attitude ascribed to
the soul. Curiosity has a very utilitarian function ;
cognition only exists as the symptom, the sign of a vital
affection ; sensation is but the clue to food, to safety,
to reproductive activity, the warning signal of danger.
Present a diamond scarf-pin to a new-born human infant.
No effort of yours will succeed in attracting his attention ;
the diamond has no value for it, its rolling eyes do not
see it, its ears are deaf to your blandishments. But stick
the pin into it ; you will at once elicit vivid manifestations
of experience experience which is not at all cognitive,
but purely affective. The new-born human infant, like
the lower forms of life, is a purely affective psychological
mechanism.

Sensory power, more generally all cognitive power, is
not something ' given,' a primary datum of organic
existence ; it is a product, a result of evolution. Sensation,
no less than imagination or conceptual thought, has
been brought into being in the course of organic evolution.
It has evolved, like every other manifestation of life,
because it was useful useful, that is, to the operation
of the conative tendencies of organic life. Cognition has
developed out of feeling ; nay, more, feeling itself out
of no feeling.

If feeling can only take place as the concomitant of
change in the vital activities of an organism brought
about by changes in the conditions of those activities,
it follows that an organism the vital needs of which were
continuously and uniformly satisfied would be devoid of
feeling ; just as our physiological function of respiration
is, so long as normally carried out without check, un-
accompanied by feeling. Such an organism is not an
imaginary one, here hypothetically conceived. It is, on
the contrary, a familiar and common form of living
organization ; but in order to find it we must go back
beyond the amoeba even, beyond the beginnings of animal
life. The protozoon is by no means the most primitive

FEELING AND COGNITION 69

type of living organism. Far from it. It, on the con-
trary, represents a very definite stage, a turning-point,
a revolutionary climacteric in the course of organic
evolution. It is an animal. Animals are predatory
forms of life ; they live on prey, they are incapable of
existing except by preying : no animal life can exist
without vegetable life. Animals live, ultimately, on
vegetables ; they subsist on the nitrogenous products
which vegetables, by means of chlorophyll, form out of
atmospheric carbon by utilizing the energy of sunlight.
Animals, like all parasitic forms, have lost a power which
they no longer need, having adopted the much more con-
venient plan of leaving plants to perform the work, and
eating them. There still exist some transition forms which
do both the carbon extraction by means of chlorophyll
and the preying and eating. The appearance of animals
was the establishment of a predatory aristocracy which
exploited a defenceless class and lived on the fruits of
their labour.

In vegetable life, then, conative impulses here mainly
concerned with assimilating the chemical material needful
to the metabolism of vital existence do not take the
form of a questing effort intermittingly achieving its end,
but of a continuous appetence continuously satisfied.
The plant bathes in its food, it does not search for it
and procure it. The object of satisfaction is always
there, the conative process is purely assimilative. And
accordingly all the processes of cognitive exploration are
superfluous, and are absent. Even feeling is, doubtless,
rudimentary, dim, and crepuscular, if it be present ;
plants behave when subjected to violence like inorganic
objects. It is needless to stop to discuss here whether
in such intermittences as do occur in the conditions of
vegetable life, resulting in slow, sluggish ' tropisms '
towards light or support, whether in some reproductive
processes and, exceptionally, in the peculiar reactions
of carnivorous plants, we have the indications of some

70 PSYCHE'S LAMP

rudimentary form of affective experience. Personally I
do not doubt that it is so. But it suffices us to note
that in the vegetable world, where in general no search
for the means of satisfaction takes place, no sharp reaction
to unfavourable circumstances is observable, and no
development and differentiation of sensory organs or of
nervous apparatus, which plays so conspicuous a part
in animal evolution, no evolution of cognitive means,
has taken place.

Those developments and devices are the appanage of
questing, preying, hunting forms of life. They are not
primary attributes of life, but are as much as the most
subtle elaboration of structure or of function, an achieve-
ment, a product of conative forces. It is out of a purely
affective form of experience that sensation has been
developed and differentiated.

Our primitive animalcule has derived much enhanced
satisfaction and efficiency from the assimilation of the
ready-made proteid substances of vegetable organisms.
Its metabolic conations, instead of slowly manufacturing
protoplasm from the ambient fluid, have found a much
easier and more effectual channel of satisfaction in the
assimilation of other organisms. The intermittent event
of contact with these sets up henceforth activities directed
to their assimilation. On contact with a diatom, gases,
exhalations, issue thence which molecularly affect proto-
zoan organization. But these are not, in the origin of
life, scented, tasted, sensed ; they are merely pleasant ;
they constitute a purely affective stimulus which sets
assimilative processes to work.

But let us suppose that our primitive, predatory animal-
cule, its appetite now thoroughly alive and keen, meets
with the following adventure. The usual feelings sympto-
matic of an approaching meal are present, our voraciousness
is on the tiptoe of expectation, our organism reacts to
the usual stimulus. But this time something appears
to go wrong, our assimilative efforts are thwarted, our

FEELING AND COGNITION 71

digestive impulse is not satisfied. On the contrary,
instead of a state of satisfaction, the result is a decided
discomfort, a pain. Reaction to the customary stimulus
has resulted in dissatisfaction instead of satisfaction.
The fact is that instead of a succulent diatom we have
swallowed a flint. The result of such a lamentable
experience is to damp the impulsiveness of our voracity,
to inhibit our deglutitional reflex, as the physiologist
would put it. The conative impulse is not abolished ;
it is too fundamental for that ; but it is modified. It
becomes hesitant. The affective feeling is no longer a
reliable stimulus. The organism still reacts to the
pleasant sense of apprehending a meal, but more cautiously.
Is that pleasant feeling the genuine thing or are we going
to be cruelly deceived ? The question is not, of course,
asked by the primitive animalcule, but nevertheless to
make an age-long story short a new conative impulse
becomes gradually set up. Its object is to note more
precisely the nature of that feeling, to discriminate between
the promising and the unpromising feeling, to pick out
from the affective continuum the differentiating signs
It aims, in short, at cognition : the experience from
being purely affective assumes a cognitive aspect. The
organism learns to distinguish from an originally un-
differentiated affective continuum the cognitive marks
which promise satisfaction from those which threaten
dissatisfaction. And thus in time cognition proper emerges
out of the affective state, sensation is brought into being
out of the affective result of unrealized conation.

You will, of course, interject that the above account
of the adventure of our predatory animalcule is highly
imaginative. But here again there is enough of rudi-
mentary protozoic psychology left in all the descendants
of the protozoon, ourselves included, to check the
hypothesis. The process which I have described is no
more than may be observed any day in the most highly
developed organism, making due allowance for the fact

72 PSYCHE'S LAMP

that the latter happens to be in possession of an already
formed and highly differentiated and specialized cognitive
apparatus. That apparatus does not, as a matter of fact,
perform its functions at all except at the call of affective
needs. Exactly similar to the process above described
in our primitive protozoon are those illustrated by the
new-born chick in the classical observations of Professor
Lloyd- Morgan. 1

" With regard to the objects which the domestic chicks peck,
one may say that they strike at first with perfect impartiality
at anything of suitable size . . . anything and everything, not too
large, that can or cannot be seized is pecked at, and, if possible,
tested in the bill. . . . There does not seem to be any congenital
discrimination. . . . This is a matter of individual acquisition. . . .
A young chick two days old, for example, had learned to pick out
pieces of yolk from others of white of egg. ... I cut little bits
of orange peel of about the same size as the pieces of yolk, and one
of them was soon seized, but at once relinquished, the chick shaking
his head. Seizing another, he held it for a moment in his bill, but
then dropped it and scratched the base of his beak. That was
enough ; he could not again be induced to seize a piece of orange
peel. The obnoxious material was now removed and pieces of
yolk of egg substituted, but they were left untouched, being probably
taken for orange peel. Subsequently he looked at the yolk with
hesitation, but presently pecked doubtfully, not seizing, but merely
touching. Then he pecked again, seized and swallowed."

If you consider even the psychology of the chick to
be too far removed from your own, observe the human
baby. He possesses the self-same organs of cognition as
yourself, but they pour no world of sensation into his
experient soul. He has eyes and does not see, ears and
he does not hear. He has a voracious appetite and,
like the amoeba, like the chick, will suck in anything
into the pseudopods of his lips a finger, a pencil, a tin
soldier, a rose, a model aeroplane. One of the chief
functions of his nurse is to extract unsuitable foreign
bodies from his slavering little mouth. Only repeated
experience of satisfaction and dissatisfaction will gradually
lead him to differentiate by means of sensory impressions

1 Habit and Instinct, pp. 40-42.

FEELING AND COGNITION 73

between comestible and incomestible articles. Only
affective values will guide his way to sensory cognition.
Even a fully developed inherited sensory apparatus can
only come into operation through education by affective
feelings. And in ourselves no cognition can take place
unless introduced into consciousness by affective values.

Sensory organs are only developed where they can, in
ordinary circumstances, serve the utilities of conative
interests manifested in feeling. Power of tactile sensation
is distributed on the outer surface of the body, and pro-
portionally to the uses to which it can be put, but it is
absent from internal organs ; the brain itself can be
hacked about with a scalpel without the slightest sensation
being produced. Undifferentiated experience is still with
us purely affective, contains no cognitive element what-
soever. We are in health unconscious of our health,
unconscious of the operation of a thousand conative
impulses. We breathe and assimilate, and nothing
referring to those processes is represented in consciousness.
But let the function be disturbed, let the conative tendency
be obstructed, let the supply of air fail, and at once we
have a pressing experience thrust upon us, an experience
in which there is no element of cognition, but only feeling,
the feeling of discomfort, the general quality of pain.
Only those feelings which in the course of evolution have
assumed a useful, warning, exploring function have under-
gone cognitive differentiation. The rest have remained
affective, ccenaesthetic. And as we ourselves are born
purely affective beings, as in more primitive forms of
humanity the affective character of experience obtains
to the exclusion of the cognitive, so as we recede in the
scale of organic evolution all cognition rapidly dwindles,
and the experience of the organism remains purely or
largely affective.

It is inevitable that all that multitude of influences
which the universe exercises upon our organisms, and of
which only an infinitesimal portion is represented in

74 PSYCHE'S LAMP

sensation, should in reality affect us, should go to make
up our affective state at any moment. That affective
state is only in a limited measure produced by what we
perceive ; it is mainly produced by what we do not
perceive, by influences that are not cognized. What we
cognize as sensation consists of elements extracted from
that affective continuum, because we need them as signs.
They are extracted, analysed out, perceived, by being
attended to, by a cognitive effort urged by appetite or
fear, which desires to feel more keenly, more vividly,
to make feeling more delicate and acute so as to anticipate
actual painful feeling, to pick up the track of desired
objects. Sensation is constantly thus educated, rendered
more acute by actual effort, by use, as with workers in
colours, musicians, tasters, perfumers. Everyone knows
the old experiment suggested by Hack Tuke of concen-
trating one's attention upon a given point of our body, our
little finger, say, for ten minutes or so. (The ease with
which the experiment is performed differs considerably
in various people.) Sensations will make their appearance
in your little finger, tinglings, muscular sensations, twitch-
ings, sometimes acute and vivid sensations. Those sensa-
tions cannot be supposed to be created ; beyond doubt
they are present as part of our general affective tone all
the time, but they are elicited as sensations by attending
to them.

Our intellectualistic psychology declares, as might be
expected, that affections are the result of sensations,
that sensations produce feelings and emotions. It is quite
true, of course, that when once sensation or any form
of cognition has been developed for the express purpose
of signifying, of serving as a sign, the symbol of an affective
value, that sign calls up the affective state which it is
its function to announce and anticipate. And thus the
sequence comes to be reversed : the sensation gives rise
to the affection instead of the affection leading to the
sensation. All art, literature, music, employ sensation,

FEELING AND COGNITION 75

sensational symbols, in order to evoke affective states,
emotional moods. Your musician will undertake to set
up in you a flutter of the most disembodied affective
moods, of exultation or tenderness, melancholy or joy,
by propagating from the vibrations of a catgut waves
that shall strike upon your tympanum. Sensation pro-
duces affection. But the order in which the process of
artistic production originates is exactly the reverse. The
affective mood of the artist evokes sensory symbols and
images, and he uses these, sounds, colours, forms, to
translate, to express, his purely affective mood, making
them significant. Sensations give rise to affective con-
ditions because they have become symbolic of them ;
but they can only do so, acquire that symbolic value,
precisely owing to the fact that they were originally an
integral part of those affective values ; they are efficient
symbols of affections by virtue of their origin out of
them.

For that differentiation of affection into cognition to
take place it is necessary not only that experience should
be diversified in time, but that it should also be differ-
entiated in space. So long as the obstructed conation
is uniformly diffused over the entire organism it remains
pure feeling. An enormous pressure of thirty-two pounds
weighs upon every inch of our bodies ; we are entirely
incognizant of it. Let that pressure be released, as in
the ascent of a mountain or in flight, the disturbance
becomes indeed represented in consciousness, but not as
the sensation of an external event ; we feel unwell, we
have a general sense of malaise, we have no sense of
lessened pressure. The temperature of our ambient is
uniformly raised or lowered ; we feel hot or cold, we
feel, that is, not that the circumambient air is hot or
cold, but that we ourselves are hot or cold. The feeling
is entirely subjective, it is not projected into any external
object. Frogs have been roasted alive by gradually
raising the temperature of the metal plate on which they

76 PSYCHE'S LAMP

were placed, without their moving a muscle to escape ;
the feeling was not referable to any external event. The
relation of externality, the relation between subject and
object, does not exist so long as the impression affects
the entire organism ; nor does it exist for the organism
whose whole supplies are derived from the fluids and
gases in which it bathes. In order that the external
world and spacial relations should come into existence,
it is necessary that there should be a differential feeling
between one part of the organism and another, a
differential activity of those parts, a directional re-
action.

With us sense-cognition has come to be essentially
massive, bound, that is, with the idea of molar move-
ments ; we think in terms of matter, of solids. Movement
means to us the wide sweep of the limb, the play of
skeletal muscles by which our body is transported through
space, or the wholesale locomotion of huge masses of
matter, the falling or projected stone, the astral motion
of a globe. And objects are solids with a widely extended
surface which we can mentally sweep over with our hand.
The logical analysis of our sensations by introspective,
genetically oblivious psychology, leads us down to a
sensory experience of touch, of the resistance offered by
a solid body to the pressure exercised by our fingers.
That, we say, is the typical and fundamental sensation
into which all others logically resolve themselves. Sight
is only a sort of shorthand which represents to us what
sensations of touch a closer contact would yield. Distance
similarly represents the amount of muscular effort inter-
posed between us and the exercise of pressure on an object.
Sounds, smells, tastes, are likewise aerial or molecular
impacts : and they do not, moreover, except by association,
yield any presentation of external existence. Only the
massive sensations of pressure can do that, and are there-
fore the fundamental sensory experiences par excellence to
which all others are reducible.

FEELING AND COGNITION 77

So far analytic intellectualistic psychology, based on
the differentiated modes of cognition of our organism
alone. But physiologically traced down, those massive
solid, molar conceptions reduce themselves to much more
minute dimensions, resolve themselves into molecular,
chemical sensations like those of smell and taste. And
if our interpretation is correct, it is those molecular,
chemical sensations vestigially represented in us by the
senses of smell, taste, temperature, and not the massive
sensations of touch, which are the original, the oldest,
the primary sensations, and it is out of them that our
' higher senses ' have grown. They are, as it were, inter-
mediate phases between exteriorly projected sensation and
pure feeling, between cognitive and affective experience.
In themselves they do not contain any element of exte-
riority, scarcely of localization ; we could not from them
derive any concept of an external world. In fact, they
still closely approach to purely subjective sensations,
to pure feeling ; and are but vaguely differentiated
according to sensory values. Our nomenclature of smells
and tastes, like our nomenclature of feelings, is indefinite
and rudimentary, and still refers in the main to affective
values ; the rough, unsophisticated classification of those
sensations is into ' nice ' and ' nasty.'

And it is noteworthy in this connection that sensations
of smell, although they have in us become quite rudimentary
and cognitively unimportant, are still of all our sensations
those which have in the highest degree the power of reviving
affective states. Nothing will bring back to us so vividly
the actual affective atmosphere of a past situation, of
a person, of a place, as a scent, the vague, undefinable
olfactory .impression. The associative link with our
affective states, with the real significance to us in emotional
terms of the past, is closest with the chemical sense of
smell.

It is those intimate chemical forms of sensation, then,
which probably were genetically original, the first

78 PSYCHE'S LAMP

differentiation out of affective feeling ; and while they
were the only ones they left the external world as yet
unborn.

The molar plane of sensory cognition implies the molar,
directed movement of a motile, questing organism ; that
movement which is to us the type of action, of behaviour.
It implies an organic differentiation : no longer does
the organism react homogeneously as a f whole, but the
reaction of the whole expresses itself as a co-ordinated
and differentiated action of its parts. But this molar
action, the characteristic of the preying food-quest,
is, no less than the most rudimentary sensory process,
a molecular change. Our power of movement which calls
to mind the power to raise our arm aloft in response to
a nervous impulse transmitted from the brain, is really
(still speaking physiologically) the power to effect very
minute changes in certain portions of the colloid substances
of our striped muscles. We do not move masses, we
move molecules. The levering up of a boulder is a chemical
operation.

And chemical sensations are not presentations of extended
objects, are not spacially extended.

The transition from that diffuse unspacial feeling and
acting is, like that from pure feeling to sensation of any
kind, definitely traceable to the animal food-quest. The
end of the preying animal is no longer to assimilate a
quantum of energy, but to enclose an object as the means
to that assimilation of energy. The searching organism
came to react not to the emanations alone of its prey,
but to its contact. It felt it as something resistant to
be englobed. In the amoeboid organism englobing and
seizing its prey was the first origin of that relation which
was to become the refrain of German metaphysics, the
pendulum swing of ' subject ' and ' object.' The prey,
henceforth the object of desire, was felt, encircled,
devoured. It was the first not-me, not an object of
rarefied academic-philosophic contemplation, but of crude,

FEELING AND COGNITION 79

voracious animal appetite, the prototype of all not-me's,
of the external universe of contemplative thought.

An object, a material thing, is still for us essentially
something seizable, something that we can mentally
encompass and embrace, something which is extended,
as we say, which has form. It is a curious relic of that
origin that our thought is almost incapable of imaging
the obverse of compassable form, to picture an object
from the inside. Try to form a mental picture of the inside
of a sphere, of a polyhedron, of your clothes inwardly
viewed ; scarcely can you succeed in doing that ; the
mind slips involuntarily into the external view of the
object ; it requires to prehend form in order to apprehend
it at all. It still seizes the object of its cognition as a
prey.

Not only is that perception of extended solid matter
the presentation of the molar activity of seizing it, it
is, in its original and direct form, the action itself. To
' feel,' to palpate, is but a slightly attenuated and hesi-
tatingly exploratory form of seizing, grasping, engulfing.
The operation of sensing matter is carried out by the
act itself of manipulating it.

With the alertness of life to avail itself of every
opportunity, another quite different form of sensation,
the perception of luminous waves of various lengths, has
become utilized to forestall the actual palpatory act,
by associating with it the visual form of sensation. Apart
from that association the effect of light is a purely chemical
one one of the first and most important forms of chemical
energy, indeed, utilized by organic life in its metabolic
reactions and it has no quality whatever of spaciality,
of extension, of materiality about it. That association
is purely a matter of empirical education, of individual
education even. To patients operated on for congenital
cataract there is no suggestion of form or extended space
in visual impressions ; as in the famous case of Cheselden's
patient who described all objects as " touching his eyes."

80 PSYCHE'S LAMP

In certain strange cerebral disorders, known as ' apraxia,'
or ' psychic blindness/ the structural channels of associa-
tion between the visual and motor centres are affected ;
the patient's vision is quite unimpaired, he sees perfectly,
but things have no longer any meaning, they are un-
recognizable, they are no longer material objects. His
motor powers are as intact as his sight, but they can no
longer be used in association with it. It is through the
circuitous device of that association that a form of sensory
feeling which is in itself wholly destitute of spacial
qualities, which presents nothing but an unextended and
unexternal modification of feeling, has come, through
its far-flung synthesis and symbolic representation of
molar movement, to be the ' dominant sense ' of con-
ceptual consciousness ; causing the ' material world ' to
be ' imaged ' in the mind's vision. The mind will thence-
forth contemplate ' images,' think in terms of spacially
extended solid ' objects.'

By that presentation of molar motion all other sensory
forms of presentation have come to be superseded, and
dismissed as ' secondary attributes of matter.' That
evaluation is the consequence of the fact that the molar
motion which matter represents has itself superseded the
mere chemical, diffuse, intimate reactions, which con-
stituted the primary activities of life, and which have
now become degraded to the level of * physiological/
' vegetative ' acts, a secondary dualism being thus set up
between ' life ' and ' mind/

But the original presentation and the fundamental one
was, for all that, a diffuse, unextended, unexternalized
modification of feeling ; and the original and fundamental
reactions and activities of life were formless, chemical,
molecular, unextended. The molar acts which seize,
grasp, and move and which are reducible in physiological
analysis to chemical, molecular reactions and the material
objects of those acts, pertain to the order of instrumen-
tality, of means. And in fact, for all the illusions of our

FEELING AND COGNITION 81

materialistic conceptual thought, matter can never be a
real object, an object of our conation. Nobody desires a
material object as such, nobody has a wish to possess
matter. The material object which we desire, the material
behaviour by which we effect changes in matter and seek
to compass it, are never ends in themselves, but always
as for the first preying amoeba means to reactions which
have nothing spacial about them, to assimilations that
are not molar, to feelings which have no extended form.

CHAPTER IV

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION

EPISTEMOLOGICAL psychology has elaborated and refined
its distinctions between the various forms and grades of
cognition. Chasms of discriminating differentiation have
been set between the various cognitive processes of sensa-
tion, perception, conception, ideation, intellect, thought,
which have come to appear fundamental ; discriminations
which an ingenious analysis may carry much farther, as
in those subtle Kantian distinctions between ' the reason '
and ' the understanding ' ' Vernunft ' and ' Ver stand.'
In spite of modern developments, the old notion of separate
' faculties ' appears to linger yet, insidiously disguised,
in the realm of cognitive psychology ; and the ' faculty '
which senses an ' intuition ' is generally regarded as
having little in common with the abstract thought of
the philosopher that classifies the categories of the
intellect. It is not, indeed, so very long ago since the
power of conceptual thought was regarded as a special
' human faculty ' obviously and utterly distinct in
nature from the crude instincts and sensations of
animals.

Genetically viewed and analysed, the facts testify to
the exact opposite of such a view. There are no separate
4 faculties ' ; there is an operation of cognition, and the
essential mode of that operation is the same from the
dimmest rudiments of sensation to the highest flights of
discursive and abstract thought. Sensory perceptions are
not data of experience, the bricks, as it were, out of which

82

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 83

have been built up the high structures of conceptual
thought. In the cognitive activity of sensory perception,
even in its most rudimentary form, are implicated in all
essential respects the modes of operation of every cogni-
tive process up to their highest phases of development.
Cognitive processes, from those which modify the reaction
of an animalcule to those which constitute the thought
of the philosopher, differ in degree of elaboration only ;
in the essential principles of their activity they are
fundamentally identical.

Every cognitive process, whether it be the most primitive
form of nascent sensation or the most abstract analysis
of metaphysical thought, is an act of comparison. In
the one as in the other there is this judgment, ' This is
like (or unlike) that.' Primitive sensation differentiates
out of the affective continuum the cognitive elements
of likeness or unlikeness which serve to forestall the
affective value of experience to recognize or distinguish
that which leads to pain and that which leads to satisfaction.
It is an act of comparison between two affective states,
which recognizes their likeness or unlikeness. You will
find in Kant nothing beyond a series of such comparisons.
Every predicate that we assign to an object is the term
of a comparison of that object with another object or
class of objects.

When a primitive protozoon impelled by the conative
needs of its life gropes towards their satisfaction and
lights instead upon a dissatisfaction, retracting itself
from the stimulus which it at first sought, a contrast
is set up between the situation to which the dispositions
of the organism were attuned and that which comes upon
them. The actual situation is organically contrasted with
the one which the organic forces were prepared to meet.
The latter term of the relation is the reproduction of the
previous habitual reaction so far as the organism is con-
cerned, a representation, a memory, howsoever rudi-
mentarily constituted by the renewal of the conative

84 PSYCHE'S LAMP

attitude called for by the apparent repetition of a former
situation.

Higher, much higher, in the scale of evolution some
affectively prominent cognition, sign, or sensation, or a
small group of such, serves as a symbol for the whole
group ot experiences : the scent of the quarry is followed,
the roar of the enemy is feared. Here the actual experience,
the seizing of the quarry, the mawling by the enemy, is
not awaited ; it is forestalled, replaced by a sensory
sign which has come to be indicative, symbolic of it.
The present term of the comparison, the experience, is
symbolic, and the symbol, by its function, identifies it
with a past experience. Every sensory act is a protention
in time of the actual moment ; it looks before and after.
It reproduces a previous affective attitude, and anticipates
an impendent experience ; it is a means to the modification
of the latter.

The comparing activity is the same whether it is applied
to the exploration of the environment or, as ingenuity,
or practical reason, to the discovery of means. The
means employed by animal or human ingenuity to deal
with a novel situation are drawn from activities previously
employed for another purpose. Their discovery and
application is a comparison of the present situation
with those in which the means have proved efficient.
When, for example, the path of traffic of foraging ants is
blocked by an unsur mount able obstacle, the activities
habitually employed by the insects in constructing their
storehouses suggests itself as a means of dealing with
the present problem, and the ants set to digging a tunnel
under the obstacle.

Always a past experience or conative effort is compared
with the present. It is not until the highest steps of
mental evolution have been approached that memory,
symbolic representation of past situations, grows gradually
to be more or less independent of the actual present
situation, and is evoked by the mere play of conative

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 85

impulses. Thought in terms of symbols having an affective
value independently of the actual presentation of the
symbol (sensation), representation without the assistance
of instant experience, has then become possible.

The great achievement which created the ' human
faculty ' and dug between man and every other living
organism that yawning abyss which came to be the
Cartesian gulf between soul and mechanism, between man
and brute, was solely the elaborate development of a
perfected symbolism the word. It is the invention of
that symbolism out of the emotional cry, the call, the
warning signal, the omatopoietic sound, which has brought
about the possibility of human thought. The fixed symbol
has rendered possible the evolution of abstraction, has
forced its development in a geometrical progression which
has transformed cognition from the amoeba's sensation
into the discursive reason of the philosopher. But in that
prodigious transformation nothing in the essential process
has been changed. Sensations, no less than words, are
symbolic presentations of differences and similarities,
which relate past, present, and future experience.

In the growth of language the first descriptive words
(cognitive in function, as distinguished from the affective
cries, chants, exclamations of emotion) are not verbs,
are not nouns, but adjectives, that is, predicates. The
subject of the primitive sentence is pointed to with
the finger, the other term of the comparison, the
predicate, is alone expressed. The noun, the name, the
verb, are derivatives of the adjective. Thus in Sanscrit
deva, shining, comes to signify the god ; surya, splendid,
comes to signify the sun ; akva, rapid, becomes the name
of the horse. The intellect seizes upon the striking,
the distinctive quality of the object, and predicates it
of it.

The act of predication which is the form of all thought,
of all judgment, is a comparison, a differentiation of the
present object from a represented object, or its subsumption

86 PSYCHE'S LAMP

under the likeness of another. When I say, ' That apple
is red,' I am comparing it with other apples, with other
obj ects that are not red. Were the whole world incardinate,
no predication, no comparison, and no sensation of colour
would be possible. It is in the increasing nicety of dis-
tinguishing analysis, and in the broadening abstractness
of generalizing assimilation that the triumphs of human
thought are manifested.

It was one of the debates of eighteenth-century thought
whether the particular or the general was the starting-
point of cogitation. The question rested upon a confusion.
All cognition, all thought, develops primitively in view,
and by virtue of its immediate utilitarian functions alone.
No distinction is ever drawn unless it is forced upon the
organism by a vital and urgent interest. Hence ex-
periences and objects which are identical in their values
in terms of the interests at stake are not distinguished.
To the primitive organism all things good to eat are cogni-
tively identical. To the new-born mammal all that can
be sucked is of equal value and remains undistinguished ;
the unsatisfactory experience of cheated appetite alone
leads the lamb, the human baby, to differentiate between
a tuft of wool, a finger, and the nipple. Baby, again,
learns to recognize, that is, to assimilate to antecedent
experience, the somewhat terrifying object ' dada,' and
only later to distinguish between various ' dadas.' It
makes the acquaintance of the object ' geegee,' and comes
to distinguish it from the object ' moocow ' with which
at first it confounded it. That primitive confusion is not
at all an assimilation, a subsumption, but a failure to
distinguish. Assimilation proper is the part of higher
thought which re-unites under perceived likenesses what
primitive thought has distinguished and separated. There
are thus in the progress of all cognition three stages :
(i) primitive confusion, (2) discrimination and distinction,
and (3) the perception of the fundamental likeness under
the distinction. It is true, then, as Leibniz contended

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 87

against Locke and his school, that the evolution of con-
ceptual thought proceeds from the general to the particular ;
but the primitive ' general ' is not a cognitive achievement,
it is, on the contrary, a failure to distinguish. And there
is all the difference in the world between the thought
which is too confused to distinguish, and that which
subsumes and assimilates. The vice of thought of the
dogmatic blockhead against whom one argues in vain
is, on the other hand, mainly a failure to assimilate ; as
if, having perceived the distinction between one ' dada '
and another, one should fail to recognize the similarity
between all men.

When cognition for its own sake, to know, to understand,
has itself, in higher human thought, become a desire,
a goal of conation, likeness is sought under diversity ;
the ground likeness is the fundamental, the essential, the
diversity is the superficial, the contingent. And the
thought of the thinker probes the universe of experience
in quest of the ultimate, fundamental likeness of all
being, and travels on its path towards the subsumption
of all happenings under the law of their action, of the
Many under the One.

That portentous evolution from sensation upwards has
depended upon the perfecting of the symbolism by which
one or both terms of the comparison are represented, and
the wonders of the ' human faculty ' are the result of the
possibilities opened up by the symbolic system of language ;
to that power of the sign rather than to any very peculiar
power of more elaborate comparison or of representation,
of memory.

Representative memory has come to be regarded as the
most striking and characteristic power of higher conscious-
ness. It is one which fills us with wonder when we consider
it, one which we tend to regard, in our marvel at its
performances, as well-nigh the essence of mind. That
I should be able to evoke out of nothing, as it were, a
picture, an object of contemplation, which does not exist

88 PSYCHE'S LAMP

in the actual world before me ; that this picture, this
abstract idea, which I gaze at with my ' mind's eye '
should be the real content of my consciousness, the object
of my attention, to the exclusion of the actual world
that impinges upon me it is little wonder that I should
regard that power as the supreme privilege of mind, the
marvel of it which sets it apart from the unsentient
universe moored and bound to the actual. It is that
power to have something in my mind which is not in the
world before me, which, more than anything else, suggests
the conception of mind as something independently
existing, a separate ' substance,' other than the gross,
actual, material world.

In speculating upon the modus operandi of that power
the first vague explanation that suggests itself is that,
in some manner, previous sensory experiences are ' stored '
in the mind ; that there exist in the mind certain archives
in which records of sensory experiences are filed for future
reference, as a series of little photographs, say, of which
an enormous number are pigeon-holed in the brain, to
be brought out and inspected when required.

That ingenuous conception can no longer be seriously
countenanced. There are no little photographs. What
primarily tends to be reproduced is, of course, the reaction
itself of the organism to a given situation. That is the
distinctive property of a living system of energy to
be able to repeat its reactions. In the absence of the
situation, the reaction is not repeated, but the disposition
to such a repetition is nevertheless there, and what in
consciousness corresponds to that disposition is not a
sensation, but a pure feeling, an affective state.

It is extraordinary that introspective psychology should
ever have imagined that the memory of a sensation
resembles a sensation, that the memory of yesterday's
dinner resembles any sensation of the dinner, or that
the memory of a blow on the head resembles a blow on
the head. No one has ever been able to perform such

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 89

a feat as to ' reproduce a sensation.' We do not pick out
photographs from the pigeon-holes of our archives, we
assume the affective attitude corresponding to a past
experience, an attitude with which not a glimmer of sen-
sation is connected. Memory does not in idle moments
turn over the leaves of a sensory record, but rehearses
the affective values, the emotional colouring with which
it has at one time or another vibrated. It is that affective
tone which in turn sets quivering the sensory state which
may reproduce the cognition abstracted from the sensual
experience (not the sensory experience itself). The picture,
the photograph, is not the cause of the mnemonic experience,
but, in a very imperfect form, the possible result of the
affective reproduction, a result which may quite well be,
and very generally is, entirely absent.

I was reading in bed the other night a very dry and
technical book of philosophy, my attention being appro-
priately concentrated on the abstract argument, when
suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, I became vividly
conscious of an undefined feeling, a feeling of a previous
experience, of a situation in which I had previously
found myself, a feeling with which no sensory image what-
ever, no definite sensation, was connected, only describable
as a sense of exhilaration and well-being, of breathing
freely, of gladness and health and joy of life ; and I
knew that somewhere, at some time, just that same
chord of feeling had been struck in me. The feeling, for
all its disembodiedness and vagueness, was so vivid in
tone that I was greatly interested in the phenomenon,
and set about ' psycho-analysing ' to endeavour to
elucidate it. I was fortunate enough to succeed. It
was a clear summer night, and not many miles from the
lower Thames. Presently I heard the clear, though
distant sound of the siren of a small steamer. At once
the sound harmonized completely with the tone of the
feeling I had experienced ; and then the images associated
with that feeling at once made their appearance. I was

90 PSYCHE'S LAMP

leaning over the smooth, age-worn, yellow marble of a
balcony looking out on the Grand Canal in Venice, with
the Dogana and Giudecca before me, and there reached
me with the peculiar tone of sound over still water, the
call of the siren of one of the small Lido steamers from
the Riva degli Schiavoni.

As in like experiences which everyone will be able to
recall, the tone of feeling is reproduced quite independently
of sensory images which may or may not be present.
We exaggerate altogether the power and accuracy of
sensual memories. When the affective state corresponding
to those sensations is revived, the illusion is produced
that the sensations themselves are revived. No sensation
is ever revived. And the whole sensory representation
is an illusion arising from the projection of the sensory
experience through the affective tone. We imagine that
we could reproduce quite clearly the sight of a familiar
street, the appearance of an absent friend. Put that
belief to the test. You will be altogether at a loss to
describe accurately either the sky-line of the street which
is most tritely familiar to you, or the features of your
friend, the exact shape of his nose, say, unless you happen
to have specially noted it. What we remember is a
' general impression,' a local colour, the manner and
mannerisms, the tone of voice of our friends. ' Unless
you have specially noted it ' in that qualification lies
the real key to sensory memory. A building, say, which
you have merely looked at with the idle curiosity of a
tourist, will be ' remembered ' by you merely in an affective
way as a ' general impression,' and if asked to sketch
it or to describe some particulars about it, how many
windows it has, for instance, the illusoriness of your
memory image will be at once exposed. You may, however,
have studied it more closely, you may have noted this or
that particular feature of it accurately, cognitively ; in
that case you will remember that it has three doors,
say, with full rounded arches, eight pointed windows,

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 91

and so forth. But observe the character of that mental
noting ; it extracts elements in a purely cognitive manner,
and they are remembered in the same way, that is, in an
intellectual way, as a statement for the most part that
could be put into words, rather than as an image. The
image is not remembered, but reconstructed from the
statement. Only a mere schematic image can be thus
committed to memory, not at all a visual impression.
You are perfectly familiar with the appearance of your
absent friend and totally unable to say whether his nose
is straight or curved at the bridge, unless you have noted
the fact. Your artist friend will sketch you from memory
a striking likeness of So-and-so ; but his ability to do
so depends upon the fact that he has made a particular
note, an analysis from the cognitive point of view of his
characteristic features ; he has committed them to memory
with an artist's observation. We note nothing cognitively
unless urged by a special interest to do so. We are
satisfied with the ' general impression ' which suffices
quite well for all our purposes, and our representation,
our memory, cannot be fuller than our presentation. It is,
on the contrary, by many degrees more vague and indefinite.
A good memory in regard to some particular class of
objects of cognition is merely the more interested cognitive
noting of the presentation. Memory training is training
in observation.

Our human powers of thought depend upon the
symbolism of the word, and we think in words. That
we cannot think except in words, as was contended by
Max Muller, for instance, is not correct. We cannot
think except in symbols, and other symbols, pictorial,
auditory, tactual, may be used, as in all pre-linguistic
stages they are, instead of words. Words are merely
a much more efficient system of symbols, and they are
used in thought with all the enhanced facility and economy
which symbols afford, and also with the disadvantages
which symbols entail. Like the mathematician who comes

92 PSYCHE'S LAMP

to lose sight of the meaning of the symbols which he com-
bines, and is unable to interpret the symbolic result to
which he is led, word-thought constantly becomes entangled
in its own machinery of symbols, and brings forth into
the world grotesque nonsense and verbal vacuities. The
mass of mankind are ruled by the traditional, titular
authority of words, and do not look beyond the consecrated
symbol. Professor Ribot once made an interesting inves-
tigation into the representations spontaneously called
up by abstract words. The results were in most cases
ludicrous, even in people of the highest culture. With
many the spoken word is found to awaken the mental
presentation of its printed form. With others such a
presentation is wholly absent, and difficult to call up,
even intentionally ; the word-presentation is purely
auditive. At its best in the trained mind abstract word-
symbolism fulfils its function through the meaning of
words having once been sufficiently investigated and
pondered ; they thus become, like objects, complexes of
varied values and utilitarian meanings, any particular
aspect of which is called forth by the particular use to
which they are put.

It is, in short, only the affective value, the use, the
interest which in every case is reproduced ; when a
purely cognitive value is represented it is by virtue of
the fact that it has been observed in the light of a cognitive
interest, has acquired a separate value of its own. We
find it extremely difficult to compose a mental picture
from a mere description, or even a graphic delineation,
of unknown places, unknown people, when the sensory
data of form, colour, etc., alone are supplied. Our recon-
struction from such materials is, we find if we have the
opportunity of checking it with the original, totally
unlike the impression which we receive from the latter.
The affective value, the emotional chord struck upon our
conative appetences, our likes and dislikes, is the real
fact of all experience. We can, or we imagine that we

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 98

can, reconstruct the sensory experience from that ; but
we cannot reverse the process and reconstruct an affective
impression from merely sensory data. Hence the failure
of art which is merely representative and accurate.

The actual world of experience is a world which affects
us, an affective world, and one in which the possible
reaction of that effect upon us, and our possible action
upon it, are viewed. The illusion of a passively spectat-
ing organism bombarded by multifarious sensations and
' presented ' objects of knowledge is one that is created
by the watchfulness of our organic sensory vedets. That
conception, however, is that of the abstract philosopher,
not that of the experient organism itself. For the latter
the sensory world is still, as in its origin, the inten-
tional discovery of an interested quest ; and only those
constituents of it are noted whose relation, actual or
symbolically significant, to conative tendencies bestows
upon them a title to affective value.

Nor does it present itself as a mosaic of sensations ;
the living organism cares nothing about sensations as such ;
it cares about food, safety, pain, pleasure, it cares about
the satisfaction of its conative dispositions and impulses. It
cares about sensations, cognitively regarded, only in the
capacity of signs, indications useful in relation to vital
purposes. Only the philosopher analyses the external
world into a world of sensations ; to the unsophisticated
organism, to the questing animal, to the savage, to man
when he does not don the attitude of the epistemolo
gical philosopher, it is not a world of sensations at all,
but a world of objects, of things. Those objects are not
synthetized by the organism out of a bundle of sensations.
These are but means which, having achieved their purpose,
have no longer a value, an interest, and are discarded
and disregarded. As once out of the undistinguished
impinging affective ambient, the primitive organism
picked out the sensory signs of discrimination, so in the
developed sensory world the higher organism picks out

94 PSYCHE'S LAMP

objects which it does not analyse down into sensory
constituents. Only as the need is imposed by interested
motives does it perform that task of analysis and com-
parison, and dissociates differentiating qualities in the same
way as the primitive organism compared one affective
state with another, and dissociated distinguishing sensa-
tions. Objects and the qualities of objects are compared
and judged.

To compare is necessarily to establish between objects
a relation. Those relations are as real as that consistency
of sensation which enables us to outline the possibilities
of action in the external world ; it is the fragmentation
of that world into objects, for our purposes and in our
sense, which is arbitrary. That collection of objects is,
in the human abstract intellect informed and quickened
by a livelier notion of their relation through the concept
of causation. Things are not merely compared as like
and unlike, but as cause and effect. And the comparing
intellect is raised to new powers of interpretation by that
notion upon which all its reasoned constructions are
founded.

Contemplated logically, the relation of cause and effect
presents itself thus : (i) cause produces (2) effect. But
that is not at all the psychological order. We do not
go about stumbling upon causes, and thence proceed to
inquire what effects those causes produce. That only
occurs at most in experimental laboratories, which are
quite a late development of human ingenuity. What we
commonly do is the exact reverse ; we come upon effects
and trace them to a cause ; a quite different process.
And that is not a development of human ingenuity, but
a process so ancient that its germ harks back, like that
of all cognitive processes whatsoever, to the very first
rudiments of sensation, and is implied in them.

Biologically considered, an effect is a sign. Sensation
as distinguished from affection, serves the purpose of
signifying something, something other than itself. A

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 95

nidorous odour signifies the proximity of food. A sudden
noise signifies the proximity of danger. The thing
signified by the sensation is the cause. When a gazelle
hears the roar of the lion, the effect, roar, is traced to its
cause, lion, and is associated with it in experience. The
roar is the effect of the lion, the lion is the cause of the
roar. That is the original, biological prototype of the
relation of causation, of the notion of cause. The cause
is that which the effect signifies.

The relation is not in its essence and origin an intellectual
process ; it is a crudely utilitarian, life-serving process.
Life does not speculatively contemplate rerum causas ;
it cunningly seizes upon every means of satisfying its
impulses, of protecting itself ; and it overcame the dis-
advantages of waiting for a feeling which might prove
its last, by forestalling it and detecting the signs of its
approach. It discovered sensations significant of that
proximate future ; and those sensations were the effects
of causes.

To what manner of cause the effect is referred depends
entirely upon the interest, the impulse by virtue of which
that effect is noted. To the gazelle the roar of the lion,
if associated with any representative idea at all, and not
with a mere feeling of fear, will be associated with, referred
to, the idea lion. The lion is the cause of the roar.
It will not be referred to the vibrations of the air, or of
the vocal cords in the lion's larynx, or to the nerve cells
actuating those cords, or to Providence, or to ' Natural
Selection.' The path along which an effect is traced to
its cause is laid down by the interest of the individual,
of his conative tendencies, in the situation. The cause
of the effect is that for the sake of which the effect is noted
in the service of its life-interests by the organism, as
significant.

What is the cause of a given effect depends entirely
on why we ask the question. Our notion that there are
relations at all between things is but our way of putting

96 PSYCHE'S LAMP

the fact that there are no discreet things at all, that
all things are parts or aspects of others. Our discrimination
of experience into ' things ' is part of the cognitive process
itself ; things are discriminated for the purposes of cogni-
tion. The notion that there can be entirely different things,
separate ' substances/ is a fantasy the absurdity of which
contradicts the very fact of cognition. There is no such
thing as an object absolute and unrelated ; it is not the
idea of relation which the intellect introduces into experi-
ence, but, on the contrary, it is the intellect's separations
and distinctions, its creations of substantive and discreet
objects, which is a utilitarian device of its cognitive
operations. We cannot know without separating, dis-
tinguishing ; but that separation and distinction is merely
a necessary method employed for the purpose of knowing,
of comparing, of picking out signs from the external
continuum. That continuum is restored by the third,
the assimilating, grade of cognition, by relating every
object to all others. In the physicist's conception of
the universe, for instance, every atom is the resultant
of all the forces in the universe ; separate the atom
from the universe, nothing is left of the latter. Like the
Leibnizian monad, every atom mirrors the whole universe.
The path, therefore, along which we choose to trace the
link of causation is entirely dependent upon our point
of view. The linking up, like the differentiating, is a
cognitive act, that is, the sign must correspond to that
which it signifies, the association in thought must corre-
spond to the association in experience ; else cognition fails
to perform its function. To ascribe an effect to a cause
which is not its invariable associate in experience is a fallacy
of exactly the same nature as an illusion of the senses.
To cognize for its life-serving purposes, the organism
must pick out the sign which is empirically the invariable
significant of a given situation or experience, the cause
which is the empirical associate of the effect. It must
not feel the sensation, _or frame the explanation which

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 97

it would like to be true, but that which is actually true,
which corresponds to the empirical fact.

The feeling of power, of agency, experienced in the
performance of our acts, to which all psychologists have
traced the notion of cause, is but a quite secondary notion
introduced at a much later biological date into the process.
The agent, the efficient cause, is but a special case of the
relation of sign and thing signified, effect and cause.
One of the commonest interests by which man in a social
state is prompted to trace an effect to its cause, a sign
to the thing signified, is to discover ' Who did this ? '
The interest is in the human agent. And the human agent
is picked out from among the multitude of causes of a
given effect as the one with which we are concerned.
There is, of course, a strong tendency in primitive psy-
chology to extend the idea of human agency, to ascribe
the thunderstorm, the flood, to a human agent. But it
is untrue to say that the notion of agency is at the root
of that of cause. Even in the most primitive and un-
sophisticated psychology it is not so. The savage may
not only ask, * Who did that ? ' but also ' How did he
do that ? ' and * Why did he do that ? ' Agency is but
one mode of ' explanation.' We do not in thousands of
cases think of a cause as an agent at all when we ask
why the sky is blue, why the earth is round, there is not
a trace of the notion of agency in our concepts.

To trace an effect to its cause is not the discovery
of an agent, but an explanation ; that is, a comparison
between one sequence and another. Our need originally,
of course, our life-serving, utilitarian need is satisfied
when we have perceived the similarity between one chain
of events and another ; that is all that any of our
explanations can do ; never can they discover an agent.
That subsumption, and not the discovery of an agent,
is the utility of tracing a cause. When the movements
of the moon are perceived to be similar to those of a falling
apple, they are ' explained ' ; no agent has been discovered

7

98 PSYCHE'S LAMP

in either case. The more sequences of events we perceive
to be similar, the more satisfied is our sense of explanation,
our knowledge of causes. If the likeness is found to
hold good in experience, if we can trust to finding always
similar sequences in the environment of similar events,
our explanation is true, just as our sensation is true if
it is invariably environed by similar experiences.

The notion of agency is only a special case of explanation.
We may explain motion in general by its similarity to
the motion to which we give rise. When our psychology
is confused and crude we shall say that things move because
they have thoughts, feelings, purposes ; when we perceive
that we may move without having thoughts, feelings,
purposes, and that those are only used by us to direct,
to serve our movements, that we move because we are
impelled to move, we shall say that things move because
they are impelled to move. We explain the impulse of
things to move by our impulse to move or our impulse
to move by the impulse of things to move. For here we
reach a similarity the terms of which are mutually com-
parable, and not comparable to anything else ; to test
the truth of our comparison can only be done by reducing
the differences between our movements and the movements
of things to differences in the conditions and circumstances
in which those movements are produced. When we have
reduced all sequences of events to a fundamental similarity,
we are left with a sequence which we cannot compare
to anything else, which we cannot explain. We cannot
explain it by comparing it to a particular case of that
sequence itself, by comparing it to itself.

The function of cognition here again including all
its forms from lowest to highest is to set up a state
of belief. All life's dealings with the universe postulate
belief. The primordial and original attitude of all life
towards cognition is that of implicit belief. Primitive
animal life, protozoon or human baby, believes in the
edibility of everything ; the evolution of sensation is the

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 99

calling into doubt of that belief under the strokes of
adverse experience. When a painful feeling is set up
instead of a pleasant one, the reaction is inhibited, the
organism doubts. Every step in the evolution of cognition
has been the shattering of a belief, every discovery and
development has been a disillusion. The progress of
cognition has been the progress of doubt.

Every cognitive effort constitutes a ' conflict of motives/
a contest between opposite, contradictory impulses. The
function of cognition is to inhibit the operation of incog-
nizant appetence. The amoeba that engulfs a flint instead
of a diatom, the chick which desists from pecking orange
peel that simulates yoke of egg, are being subjected to
a ' conflict of motives.' The organism desires the pleasant,
not the unpleasant, experience. The utility of the cognitive
impulse, on the other hand, is to discern the signs of the
actually impending experience, whether pleasant or un-
pleasant. In discharging that function it must do violence
to the desire for satisfaction of another impulse ; it can
only serve it by opposing it, by stifling it. The one impulse
desires to find things as it wants them to be, the other
as they are, as subsequent experience will prove them to
be. All cognition is a contest between those two tendencies ;
its function is fulfilled, or it is stultified and defeated at
the cost and peril of the organism and of the race.

That conflict is the genetic mechanism of sensation ;
it is also the theme of the evolution of human thought,
of human belief. Here the conflict is magnified a thousand-
fold.

Within the narrow range of primitive organic cognition,
which does not extend beyond the immediate consequences
of the moment, the castigating forces of instant experience
compel the efficient operation of the cognitive function.
The organism that should falsify its cognition by its
desire for pleasant truth would at once perish. And
sense-perception has become an automatic mechanism to
be counted by a shallow analysis as a datum of experience.

100 PSYCHE'S LAMP

In the work-a-day transactions of life man's cognition
is likewise compelled to exercise its function, to be honest,
to be, as we say, rational. But the opportunity for
stultification increases with the scope of cognition. When
that scope extends beyond the operation in individual
experience of the chastening, compelling forces of immediate
retribution ; when as a social being man deals with relations
the bearing of which lies beyond the experience of the
individual, in that of the race, with relations in dealing
with which his cognitive faculty must rely for its validity
upon the honesty with which it is exercised ; when it
is checked only by racial, secular, indirect, not by immediate
and individual consequences, he thinks that he is able to
deceive himself with impunity.

Even greater obstacles than those arising from these
intrinsic conditions militate in human society against
the cognitive effort. Symbolic thoughts and concepts are
transmitted socially ; and that heredity is not the product
of a cognitive impulse, but of the interests of domination
involved in the social conflict. The cognitive effort is
not opposed by the individual's desire for falsehood alone,
but by all the accumulated desires for falsehood of
generations of established ruling powers, hedged with
awful, sanctified values. The ' conflict of motives '
assumes colossal proportions. The impulses which antag-
onize the cognitive effort are of such quality and power
as almost to overwhelm it ; they do overwhelm it, so that
a purely cognitive effort is for the individual well-nigh
impossible. Only by a long-drawn racial, secular process,
by the overtaking of lies by the Nemesis of their conse-
quences in the racial evolution, can human cognitive
power be set free.

The tribulations of human thought, the wars of opinions,
the failures of metaphysics, of ethics, of politics, do not
represent intrinsic disabilities of human thought the
fallibility of reason. To charge that intellectual and
moral chaos to the imbecility of human cognition is a

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 101

gross, fundamental, and cowardly misrepresentation,
whereby human intelligence is made a scapegoat for the
effects of the non-cognitive forces that have deliberately
been employed in preventing its exercise. Human intelli-
gence has not been confronted with riddles, so much as
with lies. Its anarchy does not represent the fallibilities
of its powers, but the defeat of those powers and their
stultification in the conflict with non-cognitive impulses.

The impulse to cognition exists solely by virtue of its
utilitarian life-serviceableness ; it is useful to the organism
to discriminate between a diatom and a flint. If the desire
to find a diatom where a flint is, overcomes the desire to
discriminate between the two, the utilitarian function of
cognition is abolished at the cost of the organism. It
is not from any incapacity to distinguish between diatoms
and flints that human thought has suffered, but from the
determination that flints shall be diatoms. That suicidal
attitude none the less fatal because it is on the racial
rather than on the individual development that the
scourge of its Nemesis falls has been actually erected
into a principle of wisdom. It has been thought that
lies may be advantageous, expedient, beneficent, desirable.
The plea is urged that it is advantageous to believe that
flints are diatoms, that the object of cognition is the
pleasantness of the result, as judged by the myopic
standards of actuating interests. With blasphemous lack
of faith, thinkers and philosophers have not shrunk from
suggesting that their notion of fitness, and not the facts
of the universe, are the standard of desirability and
trustworthiness. The motive, the vis a tergo of their
thought has not been a desire for truth, but a panic fear
of truth, and they have undertaken the sacrilegious task
of fitting on the frame of their Procrustean bed a bungled
Universe, which, but for their orthopaedic offices, were
not decent to contemplate.

Human thought and human culture is at the present
day paying the penalty in its universal distrust, faith-

102 PSYCHE'S LAMP

lessness, impotence, and Nihilism of having lied to itself,
of the supreme folly of imagining that it can become
better adapted to the facts of life by trying to see them
as they are not. Had we not for centuries devoted
ourselves sedulously to extinguishing our eyes, to com-
forting ourselves by the discovery of agreeable truth, we
should not at this stage be in need of comfort, of faith
in life.

That doctrine of expedient falsehood the head-fount
of all human error, and consequently of all human suffering
arrayed in its latest garb as the fashionable thought-
quackery of Pragmatism, insinuates itself after the
manner of ' Christian Science ' under the cloak of an
indisputable truth : the functional nature of all cognition,
the utilitarian function of all truth, and smuggles under
that disguise the very poison that has paralysed those
functions. We should like the object of cognition to be
such and such, that it should be ' yoke of egg ' and not
' orange peel,' that the ' truth ' should be " attractive,
valuable, satisfying " (F. C. S. Schiller). But by that
very desire, the purpose for which cognition is sought,
its utility to us, is defeated. By desiring the truth to
be ' yoke of egg ' we shall presently get a horrible taste
in our mouths. If our attitude were solely that of finding
the sort of truth we wish to find, it would never be
cognitive at all, and no cognitive impulse the very
reverse of that attitude would ever have developed in the
world. In order to exercise a cognitive function, in order
to derive any advantage from the utility of cognition,
we must do violence to our desire that its results shall
be ' attractive, satisfying.' We must be prepared to
cognize and accept the truth which is most atrociously
unattractive and unsatisfying. We cannot cognize at all
except at that price. The Pragmatist goes about whimper-
ing that he is misunderstood, that his opponents are really
Pragmatists at heart since they too acknowledge the
functional nature of cognition. Precisely ; and it is in

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 103

the name of that very function and utility which has
been immemorially stultified by such quackery as the
Pragmatist's, that they resist his juggling defeat of it.
What the Pragmatist describes is not the function of
cognition, but the pathological breakdown of that function.
' Truth is but the interesting expression of the amiable
personality of the thinker.' Quite so, but the ' expression
of personality ' which we find unamiable and perilous
is the ' expression of the personality ' of a liar, especially
if he be lying to himself. The ' expression of personality '
that is required is the expression of an honest personality,
of one whose conception of truth is not that which he
deems agreeable.

The ' fallibility of reason,' errors, illusions, inaccuracies,
failures, mistakes, confusions, are not the things which are
of real moment ; they rectify themselves soon enough
by the natural selection of critical development. Not
those ' fallibilities,' but the nature of the cognitive impulse
which actuates the thinker and determines the process
of his thought, is the thing which essentially matters.

' Methods ' for ' the conduct of the understanding,'
' logics,' are of comparatively small account. A great im-
portance has been attached to them because it was un-
beseeming and unpleasant to avow the real fountain head
of truth and error. The notion has been cultivated that
the advancement of correct belief depends upon the dis-
covery of correct methods and ingenious ' logics.' Human
intelligence can, as a matter of fact, be pretty well trusted
to find its way to efficient methods of carrying out what
it desires to carry out. That is a biological law. But
the prerequisite for the operation of that law is that there
should be a desire, a conative impulse, to use the available
methods and instruments. Unless that is present, you
may ' perfect your methods ' and construct as many
systems of logic as you please, they will be all the more
pernicious and misleading the more they are ' perfected.'
Everyone imagines, of course, that he desires truth. The

104 PSYCHE'S LAMP

mystic, the champion of beseeming tradition and power-
thought, will speak with as much conviction as anyone
about his desire for truth. Here, then, we have a seemingly
hopeless impasse, and there appears no escape from the
personal view. But there is one test Are you prepared
to receive the truth that you most intensely dislike, the
truth which in its whole significance is most abhorrent
to you ? That is the only Ithuriel's spear by which
you may know whether you are capable of truth. The
only ' method ' that matters is to reverse the Pragmatist's
test. The only pernicious method is that of desiring
' agreeable ' truth.

What is an ' unpleasant ' truth ? It is, in a broad
biological sense, the truth to which we are not as yet
adapted ; it is the truth that is too big for us, the truth
up to which we have not grown, for which we are too
little.

To straightforward cognition arising out of experience
the notion of truth is in no doubt ; it is perfectly definite
and simple. It is the fulfilment of the function of all
cognition which only operates in order to discriminate
in present experience the signs of an experience that is
not present. It fulfils that function or fails to do so
according as experience agrees or disagrees with the
belief. If I say that there is a table in the next room,
or that there are pyramids at Gizeh, the truth of my
statement will be confirmed or confuted according as,
on proceeding to the next room or to Gizeh, I shall find
a table or pyramids. We need no metaphysical acumen
to elucidate our notions of truth and falsehood, of validity
or invalidity, in the beliefs we act upon, in all the concrete
relations of life. To the youthful delinquent who is
charged in connection with the disappearance of the
jam from the pantry, jesting Pilate's question presents
no riddle. He has a perfectly clear and definite notion
of the difference between truth and a taradiddle. It is
only by the woolly suggestion that Tommy's truth refers

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 105

to one kind of veracity and Pilate's and the metaphysician's
to another that a smoke-screen of confusion is cast about
the latter.

The apparent difference is that some beliefs refer to
matters that are at once directly checked by experience,
and others to what lies beyond experience, and cannot
therefore be checked. But no cognition, true or false,
valid or invalid, transcends experience ; for no question
can arise at all except out of experience, and the relation
to experience which sets the question likewise checks
the validity of the answer. The only difference is that
the control of experience is exercised more or less directly,
takes a longer or a shorter time to operate. Experience
demands cash, or gives a short or a long credit ; but pay-
ment is invariably exacted. The longer the range of our
questions, the more we are thrown back upon the accuracy
of our thought ; our intellect is placed upon its honour.
Our belief has a meaning or it has none, it is honest or
it is dishonest. The meaning of a belief is either a
presentation in terms of our experience, whether sensory
or affective, whatever the postulated conditions of that
experience ; or it is the apprehension of the inapplicability
of those forms of our experience. But whatever differences
of degree may obtain in the conditions of our cognition,
those of our veracity remain unaltered. We think the
fancy has been sedulously encouraged that we are at
liberty to shape our ' truth ' as we please because no
stern contradicting experience will pull us up and chastise
us. It will. We or our children will be pulled up, will
pay the full penalty of false cognition as surely and far
more disastrously than if experience punished our self-
deception by choking us on the spot. The consequences
of Big Lies are exactly of the same kind as the consequences
of little lies they are found out.

And that is the great justification of our confidence
in our powers of cognition. You think that you have
demonstrated the ' fallibility of reason ' by showing that

106 PSYCHE'S LAMP

it can go wildly astray, and that there are things that
we cannot know. You have done nothing of the sort.
The function of cognition is not to know all, but to attain
to accuracy in what it does know. And rational thought
does, as a matter of fact, always sooner or later find out
lies. The ' attractive, valuable, satisfying ' lie which
you thought was quite safe because it dealt with matters
' beyond experience ' and could not be found out like
Tommy's taradiddle, is found out nevertheless. ' Fallible '
human reason some day infallibly detects it. And the
consequences of that detection are immeasurably more
disastrous than the consequences of the detection of
little lies. The world is sick to-day from nothing else
than from the effects of ' attractive, valuable, satisfying '
lies. A fool's paradise may be ' attractive, valuable,
satisfying ' for a time to the fool ; it is humanity at
large that bears the brunt of the consequences.

That ineludible fate of all falsehood is the vindication
of our cognitive powers. Those powers have operated
despite all wills to falsehood ; they have, in spite of all,
made for accuracy of thought. Metaphysical thought has
in spite of itself carried out the process. The ' failure of
metaphysics ' is essentially a misconception. I am one
of the few who still believe in metaphysics ; for I do not
see that metaphysical thought has ' failed.' I see, on the
contrary, that it has steadily approached, not indeed to
those goals of Unmeaning towards which it deliberately
steered, 1 but, in spite of that fantastic steering, towards
its only legitimate goal accuracy of thought. That which
is called the ' failure of metaphysics ' is, in fact, the exact
opposite ; it is the success of metaphysics. Human thought
has gradually purged itself into accuracy. Those things

1 " Die unvermeindlichen Aufgaben der reinen Vernunft selbst
sind Gott, Freiheit, und Unsterblichkeit. Die Wissenschaft aber,
deren Endabsicht mit alien ihren Zeriistungen eigentlich nur auf
die Auflosung derselben gerichtet ist, heisst Metaphysic." Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, Einleitung, iii.

DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION 107

which were once assumed postulates, unquestioned pre-
conceptions, have become to every thinker untenable,
negligible, and obsolete. The meshes of thought have
been drawn closer and closer and alternatives eliminated.
The ' failure of metaphysics ' has brought about this
result, that we know now pretty well the uses of our
cognition.

That success of metaphysics is lamented as the demon-
stration of our ignorance. But it was, on the contrary,
the grotesque incongruity of our pseudo-concepts which
constituted our ignorance. What is left by their disso-
lution is not mere blank nescience, but the valid knowledge
that the foundations of things are immeasurably greater
than the pseudo-concepts and incongruities which we
sought to substitute for their majesty.

CHAPTER V
ESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION

EVERY act of the organism modifies it. A portion of the
configuration of its energy is destroyed, and is rebuilt
slightly altered by the effect of each reaction. That
modification has a physical aspect and a psychical counter-
part. The organism is modified as a physical system,
its structure is changed. The extent of that modification
varies, for reactions frequently repeated, within wide
limits, from unobservable molecular and metabolic changes
to gross and visible molar changes. Thus the pseudopod
of a protozoon becomes, if the organism remains fixed
in one position, so that the same portion of its protoplasm
is constantly used as a pseudopod, a permanent flagellum ;
the sensitive protoplasm continuously reacting to light
waves at the same spot becomes a pigment spot, the
rudiment of an eye. The ' act ' becomes a ' structure.'
That transformation of action into molar structure takes
place most readily the simpler the organic form. Plants
react by wholesale modification of their structure. Thus,
transferred to a dry atmosphere the leaves of plants
become converted into spines ; Alpine plants transplanted
to a plain lose the squat, bunched and dwarfed appearance
of mountain floras, and acquire long stems and elongated
leaves ; watered with brine, inland plants acquire the
peculiar characters of sea-shore plants ; and so forth.
The ' intelligence of flowers ' takes the form not of acts,
but of elaborate structures, such as those which excite
our wonder and admiration in the devices of orchids.

108

AESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 109

Those structures are not, of course, the result of ' intelli-
gence,' but the cumulative effects of the reactions of the
organisms to conditions favouring or disfavouring their
activities, aided by the action of natural selection. If
those reactions have any psychical factor, it is not intel-
ligence, or even sensation, or any cognitive process, but
feeling in its original and most rudimentary form, the
pure feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

There is, of course, no essential difference between
big and small structure, between the most minute molecular
modification and the development of a visible form or
organ. Nor is there any sharp line of delimitation between
act and structure, organ and function. Specialization of
function, that is, the fixing of the type of reaction that
has once taken place, and its facilitation by repetition,
are physiological aspects of the modification of structure
brought about as a necessary result of the repeated re-
actions of the organism. Not only is the structure of the
individual organism modified, its conative dispositions are
also modified ; they have assumed a determinate objective
form, their general tendency has become a particular ten-
dency, it has become directed to definite objects, so that a
vague disposition to react to favourable circumstances has
been converted into a specific disposition to react in a
definite way to definite circumstances. That intimate
conative change is not fixed in the individual only ; any
portion separated from it that inherits the conative
tendency which is the form of the organism's life, thereby
necessarily inherits the same disposition to react to given
conditions in the way established by previous reactions.
The detached cell of a multicellular organism consisting
of structure-functionally differentiated cells, will, if it be
itself sufficiently undifferentiated and unspecialized, re-
produce the whole multicellular organism ; each daughter-
cell reacting functionally and structurally to its relation
to all others, in the same manner as the cells occupying
corresponding positions, and having corresponding physio-

110 PSYCHE'S LAMP

logical relations, reacted in the parent organism. Thus
the effects of every reaction, modifying as they do the
structure and conative tendencies of the organism, tend
to become fixed not only in the individual, but in the race.

The fixation of organic reaction in permanently modified
structure results in organized physiological function and
reflex action there is no essential distinction between
the two whereby a determinate reaction takes place
automatically in response to the appropriate stimulus.
Such a reaction approximates to our conception of a purely
' mechanical ' reaction, one which is unmodifiable by any-
psychological factor. And the reflex actions of organisms
and tissues, of decapitated animals, and brainless frogs,
were studied with great zest by Victorian science as links
between inorganic mechanism and conscious behaviour.
Reflex action afforded an example of action which, while
rigidly and mechanically fixed in material structure, was
yet ' purposive,' manifesting a clear relation to the interests
of the organism. Hence its study proved highly interesting
in the light of the ideal of deriving conscious action from
that apparently pure mechanism.

Reflex mechanism is, of course, not the source, but
the result of vital reaction. The mechanism which it
most closely resembles is not an inorganic reaction,
but a man-made machine, a mechanism into the struc-
ture of which a purpose has been introduced by the
maker of the machine. And it is in that sense that reflex
action is mechanical : it is machine-like ; the purposiveness
is derived from its origin and is fixed in its structure.
It was originally the ordinary reaction of the organism's
conative disposition in response to a feeling of satisfaction
or dissatisfaction, and the reaction has become consolidated
in structure so as to operate in one fixed manner only.
But it still differs in its mechanism from ordinary inorganic
systems and man-made machines in being set in opera-
tion by a stimulus, that is, by the production of a feeling.
We shall see that the absence of feeling from our conscious-

AESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 111

ness is no proof of the non-existence of the feeling. Apart
from that consideration we can satisfy ourselves in most
cases that reflex action takes place in response to a ' sensory '
(here meaning in reality an affective) stimulus. For
instance, one of the most obstinately operative of our
reflexes is the blinking reflex ; we are powerless to inhibit
it by any voluntary effort. Darwin relates how, while
observing a cobra, which dashed itself angrily against
the glass plate of its cage, he endeavoured to his utmost
power to inhibit his blinking reflex, but with no success.
But now try to produce the blinking reflex in a new-born
child. You cannot. That obstinate mechanical reflex
which even the mind of Darwin is unable to control,
cannot take place when a ' stimulus,' though physically
impressive, is not perceived, has no affective value. The
machine-like operation which was brought into existence
by the operation of feeling still requires some form of
feeling to set it working.

While the attempt to derive adaptive action proper from
' mechanical ' reflex was an inversion of the sequence
obviously indicated by all observation as well as by logic,
some confusion is liable to arise in the opposite direction
from our common experience that purposive effort passes
with us into subconscious automatism, as when we learn
to walk, skate, swim, write, ride a bicycle, etc. Here
the purposiveness and effort are in the first instance
elaborate, and this conversion of an elaborate purposive-
ness into a mechanism suggests a similarly elaborate
psychological origin of organic reflexes in general. The
analogy is misleading. That elaborate purposive education
does not exist except in the most highly developed forms
of life. The type of reaction which has given rise to most
organic reflexes is the original type of vital reaction.
And that has nothing to do with cognition in any form
or with a cognized purpose ; it is simply the reaction
to the pleasant or unpleasant feeling produced by a given
activity.

112 PSYCHE'S LAMP

The development of behaviour has taken place accord-
ing to two distinct types or methods of action. In the
first, actions are governed by feeling alone. They have
no conscious purpose beyond that immediately represented
by that feeling itself at the moment. To that type of
reaction the name of esthetic action may be given. In
the second type the immediate feeling is not the sole
conscious determinant, and the act itself is a step in a
chain of behaviour leading to a prospective result. It
is performed in view of that ulterior inducement. Such
an act involves cognition ; the act is performed as a
conscious means to an end. We may call such a mode
of action noetic action.

In reflex action a specific act in response to a given
feeling is fixed in the individual and in the race, just
as a feature, a mannerism, a taste for a particular kind
of food, are fixed in organic constitution and in heredity.
That fixation of reaction extends much farther than a
single reaction, in the same way as the fixation of structural
characters extends much farther than a single ' character.'
All the structural characters of an organism of extremely
complex structure and specialized differentiations are, we
know, thus fixed in the reaction of each of its constituent
cells. In suitable conditions one of those cells, being
undifferentiated for any local function, and consequently
retaining all its powers of growth (germ cell), will multiply ;
and its daughter-cells will, step by step, differentiate
themselves from one another, assuming specialized func-
tions according to their relation to other cells and to the
whole, and so go through the apparently marvellous
process of building up by stages the entire organism
anew with all its ' characters,' its tricks of manner, and
all. It is as merely puerile to imagine, as so many of our
biologists have, under the influence of Weismannian
mythology, been employed in doing, that each ' character '
whatever that may be is represented by the tessera
of a mosaic, as it would be to ascribe each of the possible

AESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 118

reactions of a carbon molecule to a separate 'gemmule'
of reaction, or the various properties of a sphere to a
corresponding number of 'biophores.' The form of the
conative disposition of every cell in the body being once
modified, its reactions to every possible relation are
thereby modified ; and every embryonic cell endowed
with the same character must of necessity, in identical
physiological circumstances, reproduce the differentiations
of corresponding cells in the parent organism which
occupy the same positional and functional relation to
the whole and to the environment.

That reproduction of reaction-values does not by any
means end with embryological development ; it continues
in ^precisely the same manner throughout the life of the
organism. Structure and behaviour are, I repeat, but
formal and superficial distinctions. Just as the character
of the conative energy common to all the cells of a multi-
cellular organism (apart from their local functional differ-
entiation) reproduces the bodily growth of their ancestry,
so it in the same manner reproduces the behaviour of
that ancestry.

Thus not only is every single act fixed, to a greater
or less extent in structure and in conative disposition,
but entire courses of conduct, entire modes of life, chains
of processes of any degree of elaboration, such as nest
or comb-building, community organization, and so forth.
That reproduction of behaviour, identical in its causation
with the reproduction of structural organization, is what
is spoken of as instinct.

The word once stood for one of the mysteries of Christian
philosophy, being the endowment bestowed by the Creator
on the beasts that perish, as the ' rational soul ' was
bestowed on man. Far from being a special endowment,
it is the primitive, straightforward operation of the
constitution of living organization, whereby life endures
apart from the individual, perpetuates itself. The results
of its reactions must, in order to that continuity, be

8

114 PSYCHE'S LAMP

in some manner fixed, transmitted. And that fixation
takes place automatically as a consequence of the
modification brought about by every act in the system
of energy whence it derives. Every reaction tends to
become fixed both in the organism and in the race ; every
successive life tends to reproduce both the organism and
its behaviour with stereotypical fidelity. The logical out-
come of the fundamental properties of living organization
would be the perpetual repetition in every detail of the
individual life. It is the breaking away from that process,
it is variation, and the noetic type of action among other
things, that constitute special afterthoughts in the methods
of life.

You are puzzled by the purposiveness and the elaborate
nature of some animal instincts. ' Purposive ' every vital
reaction is, inasmuch as it is the satisfaction of an impulse,
but the teleology of instinct is represented in consciousness
by feeling only, by likes and dislikes. Instinctive behaviour
is purely aesthetic behaviour. The organism is instigated
to a course of action by the attractiveness to him of
those actions and of the objects connected with them,
without any consciousness whatever of their utility,
without any perception of purpose. Why does a hen
sit on eggs ? why do wasps build mud-nests ? Because
they like to. There is no more to be said about it, so far
as the consciousness of the instinctive organism is con-
cerned, than about your liking for oysters or for neutral
tints. De gustibus. . . . The mode of operation of
instinct is clearly illustrated in the playful activities,
the apparently objectless activities of the young. Play
is essentially the manifestation of instinct in the absence
of its object. The kitten that has never seen a mouse,
or maybe another cat, will chase imaginary mice and
play with balls of cotton in the traditional racial manner
of dealing with mice. The pup will tear and gnaw, track
and explore. The young human male will play at building
things, at soldiers, at Red Indians, at pirates ; the young

.ESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 115

human female will play with dolls. Those activities are
attractive, amusing, engrossing. All amusement, all play,
all tastes, are manifestations of instincts, in appearance
a purposeless exuberance of energy, in their vital signifi-
cance deeply teleological. The bird plays at nest-building
with as intense an earnestness as the little girl plays
with her doll. The mason-wasp amuses itself by deftly
paralysing caterpillars and sealing them in its mud-nest,
where they will serve as food for larvae of which she knows
nothing and that she will never see. In very much the
same way with just a little more play of consciousness
about the act the dying man who knows that he has
not six months to live, will be impelled to marry the woman
he loves, or to give utterance to the ' message ' that is
in him. They like to do so ; it gives them satisfaction
to do those things, just as it gives them satisfaction to
eat. ' They,' man, bee, or wasp, are nothing but the
conative impulses of the life-force which tends towards
goals unrepresented in their consciousness, and which is
transmuted into intense desires and pleasures by any
reaction which serves its ' purpose.'

The tastes of the bee, the wasp, the sacred beetle, are
odd, concerned with peculiar, very specialized objects.
The more primitive, the more lowly, the grade of develop-
ment of life's activities, as in the ' physiological ' acts
of our living tissues, the more ' odd,' that is, specialized,
are the objects with which they are concerned, the narrower
the compass of those activities. Bees have become con-
cerned with a particular ' line ' of activities having to do
with nectar, wax, combs, hive-organization ; and their
fixed activities have developed into elaborate, minute,
finicking details concerning that particular ' line.' Once
specialization has taken place, development can only
accumulate detail upon detail within the sphere of that
specialization ; the whole conative impulse of life is confined
and imprisoned within it. In like manner a human
community to whom money has come to be the means

116 PSYCHE'S LAMP

to everything, will in time come to think economically,
to formulate all the values of life in terms of pounds,
shillings, and pence. All specialization narrows and con-
fines the range of activity, and elaborates it within that
range ; development proceeds from without inwards,
and cannot expand.

That original method of fixation which reaches its
highest perfection in insects, in whom we admire the
wonders of instinct, has its advantages and disadvantages-
It greatly simplifies and economizes individual action.
A whole elaborate course of life is supplied ready-made,
as it were, to the individual ; there is no occasion for
tentative effort, there is no room for doubts and hesitations.
For the organism there is between such a fixed, ready-
made behaviour and the tentative determination of
conduct the same difference in simplicity and economy
of individual effort and development as there is between
turning the handle of a gramophone and playing a violin.
The conduct of the living organism is already registered
and stereotyped on the plate of his nervous gramophone.
He has but to be wound up, and the behaviour is ' paid
out ' automatically. Further, the mechanism can be
indefinitely multiplied and reproduced wholesale in its
most complex and perfected form, so that every individual
of the race can ply his gramophone, and each stands at
the same level as the most efficient performer ; whereas
the violin can only be played satisfactorily by the most
gifted and highly trained individuals. On the gramophone
system of behaviour every performer is raised by heredity
to the level of a Paganini, whereas the violin system
establishes differences between individuals. The one
system is perfectly equalitarian, levelling all habilities, the
other is an inevitable source of inequality.

Against those great advantages there are, however,
serious disadvantages to be set down. The stereotyped
conduct, however complexly perfect, clearly places the'
organism at a disadvantage when dealing with. new con-

AESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 117

ditions. The elaborate perfection of its automatism is
acquired at the price of a loss in flexibility. The greater
the elaboration, the greater the fixity and rigidity ; so
that ultimately the possibilities of further development
become entirely excluded. Your gramophone-playing race
ceases to produce Paganinis. The path of development,
which proceeds from without inwards by greater and
greater elaboration of detail within a determined sphere,
ends at last in a cul-de-sac. Evolution must become
completely arrested.

The fixation of conduct in instinct was the path of
least resistance in the course of evolution. And it pro-
duced that marvel of insect behaviour which is so elaborate
and so perfect that many people have even expressed
doubts as to whether it is not superior to human methods
of conduct ; and the perfect organization, balanced
adjustment, and smooth working of insect communities,
are constantly held up as patterns and models to human
communities.

There was a stage in the course of organic evolution
when the class of insects was the crowning top of that
process. Had there been an insect philosopher at the
time, he would have had no difficulty in showing how
the marvellous achievements and powers of the insect
soul were the predestined goal towards which all the
process of evolution had from the age of the nebula been
tending. To produce a community of bees might well
be, he would delicately suggest, the very Telos of the
universe, the realization of that far-off, Divine event to
which the whole creation moves. There existed a number
of other forms of life in which the process of fixation of
behaviour, the accurate transmission of elaborated courses
of conduct in the form of solidly constructed, firmly
stable mechanisms, had not proceeded in the same way as
in insects. They were clearly unsuccessful, inferior forms,
they were obvious failures, hopelessly outclassed and
outstripped in the race of development.

118 PSYCHE'S LAMP

Strange irony ! It was precisely in those failures, in
those unsuccessful forms of life, that the future of organic
evolution lay. The descendants of those outdistanced
backward races were destined to bruise the insect under
their heels. They were lacking in the power of firmly
and solidly organizing their nervous substance in a broad-
based, efficient stable manner. Their activities were not
concentrated on one particular speciality of behaviour.
They were anarchic, disorderly persons, who had a natural
incapacity for the arts of stable government ; they could
not produce a perfect machine, so perfect as to be, like
the British Constitution, insusceptible of improvement.
They went about their business in an haphazard sort of
way, now acting in one fashion, now in another, unable
to make up their minds, having constant revolutions
and changes of policy. The insect philosopher, I have
no doubt, published a book pointing to them as fearful
examples, as inferior races, who did not know how to
behave, and even advocating the duty, the obligation
incumbent on sensibly organized insects to put a stop to
the nuisance of those wild people, and to all that experi-
menting in behaviour, which was utterly disgraceful, and
might even in time have a demoralizing influence on
soundly, rightly thinking insects.

I apologize for the flippancy. The allusiveness of our
insect philosopher is not, however, wholly irrelevant.
Life's facts are very broad. In human development as
in organic evolution, in human as in biological affairs,
the contests of the self-same forces are at work, the contests
between stability and instability, change and conservation,
preservation and development, specialization and experi-
ment. And we have the paradox that in all evolution
the main line of progress runs through the apparent
failures, and leaves apparent success stranded in back-
waters. Achievement tends to arrest ; it is the less
perfected, the less settled organization that is predestined
to ultimate success.

AESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 119

It is by the development of cognition, of noetic reaction,
that behaviour has broken through the iron circle of
fixed hereditary instinct. That fixity was the outcome
of reaction to feeling. The organism that reacts solely
to the affective value of the moment will react in exactly
the same way to its repetition ; and feeling and reaction
are stamped for ever in hereditary structure. Behaviour
is thus fixed in an eternal recurrence. Feeling is the con-
servative principle of psychical causation. The behaviour
that is governed by feeling, by emotion, by sentiment, is
the conservative type of behaviour the female, the
religious type.

Cognition, on the other hand, is intransmissible.
Powers and instruments of cognition can be handed
down by heredity, but not their products. No organism
is born with inherited sensations, presentations, ideas,
knowledge. Those it can only acquire through individual
development. With noetic behaviour the possibilities of
life, the building up of behaviour, begin anew in each
individual. Each situation must be dealt with on its
own merits. An individual instead of a racial memory,
a presentative memory instead of a motor and structural
one, is constructed.

Pure feeling, the original sole determinant of behaviour,
is bound to the present instant, to the actual moment.
./Esthetic reaction is entirely comprised within that present.
All presentation, all cognition, is the pretension in time
of the determinants of action. In the simplest cognitive
operation, in sensation, however rudimentary, the present
expands into the past and the future. In the discrimina-
tive sensory exploration an unsatisfied conative impulse
tends towards a satisfaction which is deferred ; it looks
forward into the future, is a means to an end ; and it
compares the actual by looking back upon a past experi-
ence, by reproducing a previous affective attitude. In it
are all the rudiments of desire, of memory, and of purpose.

The development of cognition is the expansion into

120 PSYCHE'S LAMP

wider and wider reaches of time of the determinants that
shape the organism's reaction to the actual present. The
cognizing organism does not react to the present merely,
but to a feeling which it forestalls. It foresees an
impending future feeling ; it has therefore time to use
the intervening conditions as values related to that fore-
seen feeling, to that hope or fear : a new range of values
is thus opened to individual cognition.

The behaviour of the purely aesthetic organism may be
elaborately teleological through the gradual building up
step by step of complex chains of action, each phase of
which calls forth the next by making it desirable to the
organism. But the conscious ' motive ' consists solely in
the affective value, in the attractiveness of that immediate
step, and that is as rigidly fixed in racial memory, as
fatally determined as the end of the process. The aesthetic
organism is essentially an automaton. In noetic action
the end may be as fixed in hereditary determination as
it is in the aesthetic organism, but the path of ways and
means that lead up to it remains labile and is not con-
sequent upon inherited aesthetic reactions, but on the
individual cognitive powers, the operation of which can
bring to light new forms of feeling, new values, new
actualizations of its conative dispositions. Thus is the
development of conation possible only in the cognizing
organism. Only through the play of increasing ranges of
cognition can the original drive of the conative forces of
life work their way to greater and greater self-realization
awakening to new possibilities as they strike out new paths
of action. Only through cognition is their development
possible.

Nowhere, above the most primitive phases, is absolutely
pure aesthetic reaction to be found ; nowhere certainly
purely noetic action. Some latitude of modification is
permitted even in the most closely organized instincts.
When the object of desire fixed in the instinct is not
available, the nearest substitute becomes an object of

121

fascination. Thus birds that are in the habit of building
on ledges of rock will adapt themselves to the eaves of
houses, and vice versa. The mason-wasp itself, the
classic of elaborate fixed instinct, has acquired in New
Zealand a taste for spiders instead of caterpillars, the
latter being unavailable. And, while noetic action operates
in conjunction with the most complex instinctive behaviour
in birds and mammals as in the building instincts of
birds, of beavers instinct, on the other hand, the
hereditary transmission of aesthetic reaction, the direct
and primitive method of determination of animal be-
haviour, continues to be operative, constitutes indeed
the foundation and the bulk of all behaviour, even
where cognition and its operation on action reach their
highest development, in man himself.

The discovery that the soul of man is compounded of
instincts has rightly been counted the greatest advance
ever made in psychological science the first glimpse,
properly speaking, of the reality of things in regard to
that. The old fantastic mythologies which pictured
animals as ' endowed ' with instinct, and man as * endowed '
with a ' rational soul,' have lapsed into the limbo of
fables.

In the psychic structure of man we see, as it were
in a geological stratification, every successive form of
vital reaction represented. His ' physiological ' functions
operate in a fixed mechanism of reaction ; his cells busy
themselves with their chemical operations, respirations
and absorptions, like those of plants and marine protozoa.
They reproduce his organism in successive stages by an
elaborate series of co-ordinated reactions, a fixed chain
of conduct. Motor, secretory acts of varying complexity
are rigidly fixed in the structure of his tissues as reflex
arcs ; some quite uncontrollable in their action, others
amenable in varying degrees to influences from other
parts of his organism. Appetences and repugnances
hereditarily established give rise to instinctive acts

122 PSYCHE'S LAMP

identical with those of other animals. The young human
seeks his mother's nipple by virtue of an instinct as old
as the earliest mammal, manifests his needs by vociferous
cries, and presently attempts to crawl and eventually
to stand on his hind-limbs. He is terrified at objects
and sounds to which affective evolution has assigned
values evocative of the instinct of fear, and seeks other
objects that have become bound up with feelings of delight
and desire ; he is sickened and disgusted, excited and
exalted, by virtue of ancestral sentiments ; explores his
environment instigated by an inherited protective and
acquisitive instinct of curiosity; becomes angry and
pugnacious in response to the stimulus of situations which
ancestral experience has marked as favourable to the exer-
cise of his terror-inspiring influence upon others ; displays
the humility of the weak before the strong, the vain
self-display of the male, the cunning wiles of the female,
and glows with the poetry of life under the blind primary
urge of her impulse to perpetuation. The great bulk of
the ' motives ' which prescribe his conduct are instinctive
impulses once acquired by his ancestry and fixed in his
organism ; he reproduces in his conduct and demeanour
the decisions laid down by primordial vegetable cellules,
by protozoan animalcules, by worms and reptiles, by
forgotten generations of his own race, by every forbear
of his motley geniture. And where he most originally,
cunningly or sublimely manifests himself in his deepest
wisdom and most soaring aspirations and ideals, he is
still giving expression to the constituent conative dis-
positions of all life, whose ultimate significance are as
invisible, as unknown, as unintelligible to him, as were
to the infusorian and the worm the instincts which they
have transmitted to him.

A very different purview from that which we were wont
to contemplate in the separate universe of the human soul !
But in the first flush of the discovery certain proportions
are liable to be overlooked, with misleading effect. The

AESTHETIC AND NOETIC ACTION 123

operation of psychic forces is fundamentally identical
throughout the course of life, from the first amoeboid
jelly to man himself. But that unity lies in the continuity
of the evolutionary process, and it behoves us to perceive,
besides that unity, the unfolding development which is
the essence of that process, to apprehend wherein its highest
products differ from its inceptions, its mature fruit from
its germ. When, in contrast with the fabulous psycho-
logies of yore, the truth is flashed upon us that there is
no disparity, no contrast, no breach in the continuity
of all animal activity and of our own, we proclaim the
new-found truth by saying that ' Man is a creature of
instinct.' That is strictly and wholly true. But when,
setting aside the controversial emphasis of the contrast
with old fables which that truth supplants, we regard
the process of psychic evolution itself, and compare human
psychism with that out of which it has grown ; when from
that point of view we say ' Man is a creature of instinct,'
the statement, while remaining true, becomes misleading.
It leaves out of sight the fact that the distinctive character
of human psychism is precisely that the part of instinct
is here reduced to smaller dimensions than in any other
organism. The distinctive trait of human psychism, as
compared with that of other animals, is the surpassing
of instinct. Man is the least instinctive of any animal.
Not the instinctiveness of his behaviour, but the relative
independence of instinct which he has achieved, is the
characteristic of human behaviour.

He is a compound of instincts, but none of those instincts
is the elaborate specialization of a given oddity of life-
pursuit ; he has inherited no comb-building, or migratory
instincts, no hard and fast social organization. He is
no bee, no wasp. He is the heir of those organic forms
that have kept instinct generalized by introducing in its
operation the control of cognition. Between the instant
situation and the goal of feeling there has become intercal-
ated in human ancestry a cognitive process of presentative

124 PSYCHE'S LAMP

values which, like a wedge, has gradually widened the
gap between the two ; and that interspace, instead of
being filled in with a chain of aesthetic reactions stamped
irretrievably in racial structure, has developed into ever
farther-reaching previsions and retrospects, with devisings
of ways and means. These are the domain of the individual
life, and are insusceptible of being fixed or transmitted in
hereditary structure.

Noetic action has culminated in the powers of the
symbolism of conceptual thought. The conative impulses
of life, hitherto groping in narrow channels of affective
response, found the way open to their actualization in
a manner never before possible. And in proportion as
man uses those cognitive powers is his control extended
* his control,' that is to say the self-realization of the
primum mobile which actuates him.

CHAPTER VI
THE ORGANISM AND FOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS

ONE great disadvantage that besets our study of conscious
psychism is that the only specimen available to direct
observation is the most complex and elaborate under the
sun. We are in very much the same position in our
investigation of psychological dynamics as we should be
if we set about the study of physical dynamics and, knowing
nothing of the simpler kinds of machines, such as a lever,
a wheel, a crank, were compelled to begin our enquiry into
mechanical principles by considering, say, a great news-
paper printing-machine whirling at high speed, with all its
cylinders, cog-wheels, tubular plates, shafts and cranks
in rapid and complex motion, and we were to endeavour
to formulate our notions of mechanical principles from
that. You may well imagine how unsatisfactory the
progress of our science of mechanics would be under
those circumstances, and how long it would take us to
discover, for instance, the simple laws of motion formulated
by Galilei and Newton. The extremely complex, composite
nature of the only form of psychic machine known to us
by direct experience constitutes a serious handicap, and
renders us naturally liable to mistake the superficial and
incidental for the essential and fundamental, a type of
error with which all our psychology is deeply fraught.

Hence it is that in order to understand the essential
and fundamental features of the operation of psychic
act on we have been obliged to refer constantly to organic
systems of energy reduced to their simplest expression,

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126 PSYCHE'S LAMP

and to follow those psychic processes not in the soul of
man only, but in that of the most rudimentary and primi-
tive organisms, of protozoa, such as the familiar amoeba.
If it be objected that we can know nothing directly of
the amoeba's soul, the reply is that we can study at our
leisure its behaviour, and that is one of the most reliable
data of psychology. A great part of our psychological
knowledge is derived from our observation of the behaviour
of others, and we can study that much more conveniently
in the amoeba than in our friends.

The amoeba has no brain or nervous system, it has no
limbs, no stomach, no lungs, no liver, no heart, no kidneys.
It is, however, a very remarkable and significant fact
that, although the amoeba is entirely destitute of all
those organs, it does essentially everything that other
animals, including ourselves, do with the whole apparatus
of nervous system, limbs, viscera, etc. It breathes as
well as you or I, it breathes with its whole body ; it
puts forth its protoplasm and makes very efficient tem-
porary limbs out of it, pseudopods, with which it crawls
about and seizes its prey as effectually as the lion seizes
his. It encloses it in a hollow space contrived for the
purpose in its protoplasm, and proceeds to secrete hydro-
chloric acid and peptic juices, and to digest its dinner
much better than many of us who have to be careful
about our diet and swallow pepsin tablets. It excretes
urea as well as if it had the most healthy kidneys. It
can be quite wide awake and react as infallibly to an
external event as if it were a mass of nerves ; and when
it has had a good dinner it curls itself up into a ball and
sleeps the sleep of the just. Although it has no eyes, its
whole body is keenly sensitive to changes of light. It
reproduces its kind by using its whole body as a germ.
You adduce the heroic paradoxes of human conduct, the
supreme sacrifice of the martyr. Well, the amoeba too
can play the martyr. It can sever its body into two
a most uncomfortable procedure, I should fancy. Perhaps

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 127

it likes it ; the martyr too, if it comes to that, ' likes '
his martyrdom, or he would not accept it. The amoeba
commits hari-kiri impelled by certain impulses which
transcend individual appetites.

Rather than say that our amoeba has no nerves, limbs,
stomach, etc., it would be considerably more correct to
say that it is all nerves, limbs, stomach, all eyes, all lungs.
There is in truth not a single act of life, not a single
physiological function that you can name, which our
most elaborate organism performs, that is not also per-
formed, in its essentials, by the single-celled amoeba.
That is a most significant and momentous fact. What
then is evolution ? We have been so filled with wonder
at the marvellous building up of an innumerable variety
of new forms from one another, at the coming out of a
whole Noah's ark out of that miserable little speck of
primordial protoplasm, at the wonders that issued from
such humble beginnings, that we had some difficulty in
crediting them. And when we come to look into the
matter, lo ! nothing new has really been produced. We
find at the very beginning of life essentially everything
that can be discovered in its crowning achievement.
Evolution has created nothing. Professor Bergson enthu-
siastically calls it ' Creative Evolution/ but of creation
in the proper sense of the word, the producing of some-
thing that was not there before, something entirely new
there is not a trace.

The essential process of all the activities and behaviours
of life is, we have seen, the satisfaction of its conative
dispositions under the guidance of feeling. That is done
by the amoeba, and nothing more is ever done by man.
What has been developed, what has been perfected, what
has been evolved, is purely and solely the means of
carrying out that reaction. Throughout the phases and
forms of organic life the disposition of energy remains
the same, the tendencies of its reactions remain the same,
the essential relation of those inherent dispositions to

128 PSYCHE'S LAMP

ambient conditions remains the same, the direction of
life's impulses remains the same.

From a biological point of view there is, fundamentally
considered, but one animal the protozoon. The single-
celled organism is properly the only existing system of
living energy. All other organic forms, the ' higher
animals,' man himself, are but combinations, aggregates
of protozoa. And all the developments of means and
powers, all the * faculties ' of higher animals and man,
are but quantitative modifications and combinations of
the functions and reactions of protozoic cells. Out of
the original protozoa all animal and human organization
has arisen, and every individual life arises likewise out of
a single protozoic cell.

The human organism consists, it is estimated, of some-
thing like twenty-six and a half billions of cells, the
progeny of the protozoic germ-cell. Of these, however,
some sixteen and a half billions are but carriers of oxygen
the red blood cells and are probably not to be regarded
as living cellular entities, but as dead cells utilized for
that mechanical function. So that the number of living
cells in the human organism may be set down at about
ten billions (10,000,000,000,000). Each of those cells is
absolutely analogous to, and many are quite undistin-
guishable from, various forms of protozoa which live an
individual life as separate organisms. Thus the white
cells of the blood are identical in structure and behaviour
with amoebae ; unstriped muscle-cells are exactly similar
to gregarinae ; the columnar and ciliated cells of the
alimentary canal, respiratory tract and Fallopian tubes,
to vorticellae or pintinni and to colpodian parasites ;
nerve-cells, the cells of the cerebral cortex, are almost
identical with rhizopods, such as gromia, chlantydomyxa,
actinophrys, and other animalcules. There is no cell in
the human organism that cannot be almost exactly
matched with some form of independent unicellular
organism.

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 129

The powers and faculties of the human organism as
a whole differ from those of an isolated protozoon only
as the powers of a highly trained and efficiently organized
army or community differ from those of their individual
component taken severally. The higher efficiency of the
organized whole depends upon the coordination of the
activities of its constituent members ; but nothing is
superadded to those powers.

Organic coordination is the effect of structural and
functional differentiation and specialization. It is of the
first importance, if we would gain an adequate conception
of the operation of the complex organism and of its
psychical activities, to understand what is implied by
that differentiation and specialization. And in order to
do so we must endeavour, first of all, to dismiss from
our minds the notion that ' hierarchies/ distinctions
between ' ruling ' and ' servile ' elements, have any place
in the organization of the living body. Anthropomorph-
izing imagination has, from the time of Plato, imported
the vices of human social organization into physiology,
in the same manner as it has imported them into cosmology,
building its conception of the universe after the model of
an Oriental satrapy, or savage patriarchy. Contemporary
physiology is still permeated with such superstitions. We
may be confidently assured that nothing of the nature
of such human stupidities and iniquities are to be thought
of in connection with the organization of any part of the
natural order.

Free protozoa become, like all other living things,
modified in structure and function in relation to their
environment and mode of life. The component cells of
a metazoic organism likewise become differentiated in
relation to their environment in the compound organism,
and to the mode of life consequent upon those relational
conditions. Cells are specialized so as to perform particular
functions ; some are particularly developed in the direction
of secretion, others in that of motility, others in that of

9

130 PSYCHE'S LAMP

particular forms of sensory cognition, and so forth. But it
must not be supposed that, while organic elements are
thus specialized, and devote the greater part of their
energy to one particular form of vital activity, they do
not at the same time retain and fulfil every function
common to all living organisms. Though the intestinal
cell is specialized for absorption, and the muscular cell
for contractility, yet the intestinal cell continues to be
contractile and the muscular cell absorbent. Specialization
is never complete ; every living cell performs all the
functions of life. Specialization involves no new form
of activity, and the specialized cell acquires no power
which it did not possess before. The modifications which
constitute specialization are quantitative, not qualitative ;
a cell specialized for a given function develops one of
the aspects of its activity in a given direction, but it
acquires no new function, nor does it cease to perform
any of the functions of life which it previously exercised.

The activities of our organisms are no more sharply
divided into ' functions ' than our mental activities are
divided into * faculties.' Our physiology to which the
elementary and fundamental laws of vital action are as
yet entirely unknown, is a sort of ' faculty physiology,'
which divides the body into * systems ' the respiratory
system, the alimentary system, the genito-urinary system,
and so forth. No * system ' has an independent function ;
its ' function ' is a resultant of the activity of all other
' systems.' The operation of the central nervous system is
indissolubly linked with exchanges of gases, digestive and
assimilative processes, excretory processes, secretory pro-
cesses, reproductive processes ; it performs each and all
of those ' functions ' in addition to those which constitute
its specialized activity. And, on the other hand, every
element in the body, no matter what its specialized
activity may be, performs in some form those functions
which are specialized in the central nervous system.

If two living cells are in organic continuity with one

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 131

another, through even the finest thread of living substance,
the reaction of both cells will be absolutely identical.
Thus when a vegetable cell connected to another by a long
protoplasmic filament of extreme tenuity, sets about
secreting a cell-membrane, the second cell, even if enucle-
ated, will do likewise and will continue to do so as long
as the connection is intact. 1 As long as two protozoa
(Stentor) remain connected by a strand of protoplasm, all
their movements will be identical in the minutest detail ;
all their cilia will vibrate in exact unison, bending in the
same direction at the same instant.* The simplest multi-
cellular organism is a mere hollow ball of flagellated cells,
Volvox ; there are, of course, no controlling or integrating
centres ; but each flagellum moves in exact unison with
all the others, so that the organism spins round in a
perpetual rotation. In fine, the conative dispositions,
even if different, of two cells that are in organic continuity
assume the equilibrium of a common conative disposition
which is the resultant of the two. The determining
principle of the activity of two such cells is equilibrated
to a common level, like water in two communicating
vessels ; so that every detail of their reaction and behaviour
is absolutely identical in both cells, provided the conditions
of the environment are substantially the same for both cells.
But suppose now that the conditions of the environment
are different for each of the two cells organically connected
Let one be situated on the external surface (ectoderm) of
a hydroid polyp, and the other on the internal surface of
its enteric cavity (endoderm). Both cells are in organic
continuity, and by the above Law of Equilibrium their
conative dispositions are identical ; but their functional
behaviour will be different because their external and
internal relations are different. The external cell is in
relation to the surrounding water, and will have to seek
its food out of it ; the internal cell is in relation with

1 C. O. Townsend, Jahrb. wiss. Botanik, xxx, 1897.

2 A. Gruber, Ber. Naturfor. Ges., Freiburg, iii.

182 PSYCHE'S LAMP

the sack-like internal cavity into which food is swallowed,
and is concerned with the digestion and absorption of
that food. Their situations are different ; and the effect
of the common conative disposition of the two cells is
to cause them, not to do the same thing, but to do what
the other would do if it were in the same situation. Both
cells have a common tendency, equal reaction-values,
identical interests ; hence the teleology of their reactions
is directed, mutatis mutandis, according to the diversity
of their situations, to the satisfaction of that common
interest. The ectodermal cell does not capture food and
retain it, but drives it into the digestive cavity ; the
endodermal cell does not assimilate the whole of the food
thus obtained by their joint action, but transmits, after
digestion, a portion of it to the ectodermal cell by means
of the fluids which bathe its external surface. The
equilibrium of the conative disposition of the two cells
results in an accurate division of labour, a perfect correla-
tion between the activities of the two. There is here no
' higher control,' there are no ' ruling cells ' ; there is no
integrative nervous system in the polyp.

In that equilibrium of the conative dispositions of
living cells organically connected, varied in its mani-
festations according to the diversity of internal and
external relations, we have, I believe, the entire modus
operandi of metazoic organization, and of those infinitely
minute and unfailing adjustments and integrations of
complex coordination, which surviving conceptions drawn
from mythological similitudes with barbaric states so
signally fail to elucidate.

The reaction of every system of energy is a function
of two factors, the disposition of the system itself and
that of the ambient conditions which call forth its reaction.
The first of those factors is a constant for every element
of the organism, the second is a variable depending upon
the total relations of the part. The modification brought
about by each reaction in the uniform factor gives rise

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 183

in turn to a modification of that factor in every part of
the organism, every element of which is modified by each
reaction of every other element.

All the cells of a multicellular organism are organically
continuous. They are, as are likewise the embryonic cells
of the developing organism, connected one with another
by numerous intercellular bridges of protoplasm. In higher
organisms those connections are supplemented and simpli-
fied by nerve connections.

It is not, however, the function of the central nervous
system of the vertebrates to establish such a connection ;
it is with the sensory and molar motor functions of the
organism that it is primarily concerned, and its distribution
to the skeletal muscles and to the organs of special sense
are adapted to that function of sensori-motor coordination.
With the viscera the connections of the central nervous
system are indirect, nor do they appear to carry any
direct motor or sensory impulses. The sympathetic
system, on the other hand, is very differently distributed.
It has no exclusive sphere ; wherever the finest capillary
vessel penetrates to support cell nutrition a sympathetic
fibre accompanies it. In it we have a complete network
of intercommunication between all the elements of the
body, and further an open channel of intercourse, through
the white and grey communicating branches, between each
and all parts and the central nervous system. There is
no indication of any centralization of function in the
sympathetic itself.

Section of the sympathetic in the neck causes dilatation
of the blood-vessels, increased tone in the muscles,
increased nutrition and keenness of sensation. Galvanic
stimulation of its fibres gives rise to the opposite effects.
Thus the sympathetic carries a stimulus which contracts
blood-vessels, withholds their food supply from the tissues,
and checks all the vital activities of the cells. When a
cell or organ is called upon, in the interests of the organism
as a whole, either in consequence of a local or of a cerebro-

134 PSYCHE'S LAMP

spinal stimulus, to exercise its specialized function, to work,
it of course requires more food, more oxygen, more nutrition.
The checking, repressing action of the sympathetic is
withdrawn. By what agency ? The question is usually dis-
missed in our physiological textbooks by saying that there
is a ' vaso-motor centre ' in the medulla oblongata. Not
to enter here into a detailed examination of the numerous
facts that might be adduced to show how inconclusive are
the grounds upon which that ' explanation ' is founded,
it will suffice to mention that those vaso-motor effects
take place after the removal not only of the medulla
oblongata, but of the greater part of the spinal cord ;
and that further, although vaso-constricting effects result
from stimulation of the medulla and of the lateral columns
of the cord, no vaso-dilator effect can be observed from
their action. After complete removal of the sympathetic
from the neck, the ear of a rabbit will regain after a time
its normal vascular condition. More, rhythmical vaso-
motor phenomena may be observed in small and entirely
detached portions of a bat's wing in which artificial
circulation is maintained.

The only interpretation that can consistently be placed
upon the facts and it affords the key to the whole
mechanism of organic coordination is that local dilatation
of the blood-vessels, increase in the supplies where they
are needed, is the effect of the activity of the cells themselves
in that part, which take more of the common share of
supplies when, in the interests of the organism, they need
more. The vaso-dilatation is brought about, not by any
centre, but by the tissues themselves. And it follows
that the checking, ' controlling,' action of the sympathetic,
which holds back supplies, is not the effect of the dominance
of any ' vaso-motor centre,' but the summation of the
needs of all the other elements of the organism. In fine,
it is by the equilibrium of the conative impulses of all
the elements of the organism maintained at a common
resultant level by their organic continuity that the

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 185

synthetic coordination of the whole is brought about
and maintained.

The function of the central nervous system, it is suffi-
ciently clear, is the coordination of the behaviour of the
organism as a whole in relation to the external world.
Primarily the brain is the organ of coordination of molar
movements ; it is a part of the skeletal muscular system.
That not any consciousness is its primary organic
function. Every molar movement of the limbs, wings,
body-muscles, is brought about by the combined and
finely adjusted action of a large number of muscles. That
balanced adjustment necessitates the coordinating action
of a distributing centre which shall allot to each muscle
the exact? amount of stimulation required for its share
in the resultant movement. The central nervous system
is that coordinating motor centre. Movements which
have proved themselves effective by long ancestral ex-
perience are permanently combined in fixed connections
reflexes mostly established in the spinal cord. Move-
ments that are not yet proved and established take place
in accordance with the results of cognitive exploration ;
and accordingly the organs of sensation must needs be,
as they are, arranged in close connection with the motor
system of the brain. But it is a quite misleading statement
of that fact, and an unwarranted assumption, to say that
the brain is the seat of sensation. This is loosely assumed
to be proven on the ground of the circumstance that
if I cut my median nerve I no longer feel a prick in my
finger. I altogether fail to see that the fact that if I cut
a telegraph wire the message is not received, is conclusive
evidence that no message has been sent.

Sensations, however, serve but to guide movements ;
they do not originate or determine them. All movement,
all behaviour, is the manifestation of dispositions that
seek satisfaction through that activity, and make use of
sensation to guide them to that consummation. The
source of that behaviour is the conative disposition of the

186 PSYCHE'S LAMP

organism. And that is neither originated by, or in any way
located in, or specially associated with, any brain structure.
The brain has nothing to do with the ultimate determi-
nant impulses that give rise to action. It is clear that
it is not the brain that is hungry or progenitively disposed,
and the tendency to satisfy hunger or love has no particular
relation to the brain. The same is true of every conative
tendency that is the source of behaviour.

Those conative dispositions are represented in conscious-
ness by the feeling, the affective tone, which is the effect
of actual conditions upon them. Those feelings, moods,
emotions, have from time immemorial been referred to
the various organs of ' vegetative life.' In Hebrew and
Oriental literature generally desires and emotions are
always located in the bowels meaning the viscera in
general : " The bowels of the wicked are cruel," " Re-
member, O Lord, thy bowels and kindnesses " ; even the
moral impulse and sense of duty was referred to the
viscera : " Thy law is in the midst of my bowels." Plato
placed courage in the chest and self-regard in the belly.
The doctine of ' temperaments ' embodies the same con-
ception in its description of the lymphatic, sanguine,
biliary dispositions. Anger and ill-humour are currently
ascribed to the liver, envy to the spleen ; though the
physicians of Salerno regarded that viscus as the seat of
joy, and ascribed love to the liver. Apart from those
fancies there are more substantial popular impressions.
The state of the mind is commonly observed to depend
upon that of the health, of the physiological activities
of the body. Much is admitted to depend upon nutrition ;
men seek the favour of princes after these have dined ;
good assimilation and circulation favour an optimistic
outlook, and Carlyle's criticisms of contemporary ideals
are usually disposed of by a reference to the condition of
his peptic glands.

The manifest correlation between general bodily states,
visceral conditions and the affective and conative dis-

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 187

position of the organism are too obvious not to have
been taken into account by scientific inquirers. Cabanis
expressed the opinion that emotions are dependent upon
visceral conditions ; Bichat, with considerable fulness
of analysis, laid stress upon the view that " all that
relates to the passions pertains to organic life," meaning
thereby the life of the visceral organs. It is, however,
only comparatively lately that accurate physiological
investigation, overcoming the obsession of the doctrine
that the brain, and the brain alone, is the ' seat of mind,'
has revealed the previously undreamt-of extent and far-
reaching magnitude of that correlation. As a result of
such studies as those of Mosso, Tanzi, Broca, Lombard,
Pawlow, and innumerable other investigators, it is now
known that there is not a function or organ, or minutest
portion of the organism, which does not register, like the
most delicate indicator, the slightest change in the affective
state of consciousness. Mental changes so slight as to
be quite uninferable from any gross motor expression, and
insignificant even in the consciousness of the subject,
are represented by definite changes in remote organs and
functions. Down to the tips of the fingers and toes,
vascular changes, measurable alterations in volume and
weight, are associated with the most imperceptible fluctua-
tion of the emotional state. The activity of every gland
and the chemical composition of every secretion in the
body are affected. The respiratory rhythm soars and sinks,
the pupil opens and contracts, the acuteness of the senses
undergoes variations in a definite relation to every change
in the mental state. There is not a cell or a biochemical
reaction of the body that cannot serve as a window through
which we may peer into the soul ; so that, as one German
physiologist, Born, enthusiastically puts it, " Die Blase
ist der Spiegel der Seele ! " The familiar fundamental
proposition of psycho-physiology, ' To every change in
the mind there corresponds a change in the brain,' must
in view of present knowledge be modified thus : ' To every

138 PSYCHE'S LAMP

change in the mind there corresponds a change in every
living cell of the organism.'

It is the consideration of such facts so utterly at
variance with the dogma that ' the brain is the organ of
mind ' which has suggested the well-known James-Lange
' theory of the emotions,' namely, that an emotional state
consists in the sum of the sensations that accompany
those organic changes, that it is the disturbed action
of the heart and respiration, the pallor, the flushing,
the tremors, the dryness of the mouth, the catching at
the throat, the perspiration, the ' goose-skin,' which
constitute an emotional state. Put thus by Lange who,
however, repudiated it later and by William James, the
theory is a psychological ' howler.' For it confounds
utterly the primary distinction between the two forms
of feeling, the presentative and the affective, sensation
and pure feeling. The ' sensations ' referred to are, it
is true, those primitive, vague, undifferentiated, quasi-
affective ccenaesthesias which are on the borderland of
the differentiation. But, on the other hand, the ' emotions'
considered in the theory include the most pronounced
abstract and sublimated forms of affection associated with
the highest developments of presentative consciousness.
It is excusable to confound a straight-out ' physical ' pain
with a sensation ; that is the primitive level at which
cognitive and affective functions are still undifferentiated ;
a ' physical ' pain may be used either in its cognitive
or its affective capacity. But the ' emotion ' produced
by grief, by anxiety, by artistic enjoyment, stands at
the opposite extreme of the affective scale, and is wholly
distinct from any sensory element or function. A man who
is overcome by a great sorrow that robs life of its value
for him, who is embittered by disappointment, changes
the whole course of his conduct, seeks solitude, severs
himself from the society of his friends, buries himself
in work and thought. His whole conduct is deeply
modified, but it is not by the sensation of bitterness

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 139

in his mouth, of dryness in his throat, or of cold in
his feet that it is modified. Sensations are here by-
products of the condition ; they are not the determinants,
the modifying factors of conduct. Those ' sensations/
moreover, represent only a few of the grosser, more
conspicuous of the organic modifications which are the
concomitants of affective states ; they are those which we
notice without the aid of any physiological investigation.
But those are but an infinitesimally small portion of the
similar phenomena which accompany emotion ; and of
the vast majority of those we are not in the least degree
aware, certainly not in the form of sensations. You
notice the quickening of your heart and the catching of
your breath, but not the increased blood-pressure in your
little toe, not the changes in chemical composition in
your thyroid gland or your kidneys. To those changes
no ' sensation ' whatever corresponds. If the few notice-
able changes " are the emotion," what are the thousands
and thousands of physiological changes that are not noticed ?
What is popularly called an ' emotion,' and what is
so designated in the Jamesian paradox, is also an abnor-
mally pronounced, accentuated, intensified affective state,
which forces itself upon our notice by its intensity what
was once upon a time called a ' passion.' That is but
a superlative degree of the affective tone which is part
of every state, however peacefully composed, which is
its foundation, which is never absent, and it is the
determinant of all modifications of action external action
or secret thought. What applies to an ' emotion ' applies
equally to the unanalysed, unnoticed affective state of
every moment ; if the former be a bundle of sensations,
so must the latter be. But that would be to abolish
every distinction between feeling and sensation, between
affection and presentation ; that is to say, the logical
issue of James's theory is exactly what James himself *
has called ' the psychologist's fallacy.'

1 Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 196.

140 PSYCHE'S LAMP

The significance of the physiological law that every
cell in the organism is modified with every change in the
affective state, becomes at once evident when the nature
of the latter is apprehended as the mould in consciousness
of the impulses which actuate us, their condition of satis-
faction or dissatisfaction. The physiological source of
those impulses and conative tendencies, and of our
activities, motor or psychical, our acts and our thoughts,
our desires and our appetences, is not the brain, but the
entire organism, and every living cell that constitutes it.
In a somewhat different sense from Aristotle's, the whole
of the soul is present in every part of the organism.

The part played by the brain is but one factor in the
process ; it does not, in any greater degree than any other
portion of the organism, create impulses to action, desires,
feelings. Its function is but that of a central junction
where the impulses of the organism are brought into relation
with the motor organs of external movement, and with
the cognitive and sensory organs. Our actions and our
thoughts are the resultant of that conjunction. Those
elements in the process which constitute our consciousness
are not the source, but only modifying factors, of our
acts and thoughts. Great as is the importance of the
modification which they may bring about, they can only
operate upon the material of action which is supplied
from other sources, upon impulses which arise from the
whole organism. The brain and its conscious processes can
do nothing towards creating that material, or determine
its ultimate tendencies and direction. The activity of
the brain itself, its cognitive processes and its associations,
are themselves actuated by impulses which are derived
from every part of the organism. It is an organ, an
instrument, like all other organs, of the conative forces
of the living organism ; a skilled and expert servant,
but a servant only of those forces.

With some of the processes taking place in the brain
consciousness, we say, is associated. That, we consider,

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 141

is but the statement of plain and indisputable fact. But,
however guardedly that statement may be worded as by
saying that consciousness is c associated with/ and not
that it is ' produced ' or ' generated ' by, the brain our
fundamental and immemorial preconceptions do neverthe-
less insinuate themselves even in our most punctiliously
cautious and uncommitting wording. For in saying that
' consciousness ' exists in relation to those brain-processes,
it is assumed and implied that it exists nowhere else,
and is not ' associated ' with any other process of the
organism, but only with those particular processes of
some brain structures. And, whatever views we may
profess or repudiate, that bare statement of fact as we
conceive it to be is tantamount to any of the statements
of Victorian materialism, that consciousness is ' produced '
or ' secreted ' by, or is ' a function of the brain ' ; and
we are left, in spite of all efforts, irretrievably entangled
in all the incongruities and antinomies of * the relation
between mind and matter/

The actual known fact is in reality slightly different.
It is not that * consciousness ' in general is ' associated '
with the brain, but that what we call ' our ' consciousness,
that is to say, just that particular sphere of feelings of
which we say ' we ' are aware, is ' associated ' with those
cerebral functions. The bare statement of assured fact
does not refer at all to the distribution of ' consciousness/
about which we have no sort of direct knowledge whatever,
but to a particular ' field of consciousness/

That field of consciousness, like the field of vision,
has, and can never have more than, one single point of
focal distinctness, whence it fades marginally, by a rapid
gradation, into blurred indistinctness, faint, and yet
fainter awareness. The similarity of the field of conscious-
ness to that of vision is probably not fortuitous ; the
disposition of the latter is, doubtless, connected with
psychological rather than optical conditions. That struc-
ture is a fundamental fact of consciousness. The

142 PSYCHE'S LAMP

supposed unextended substance, mind, deliquesces and
evaporates at the edges.

The organism at any moment is not affected by one
interest alone, but is urged and engaged by a countless
multitude of coexistent impulses. But those impulses
affect it and engage it in greatly varying degrees. Hence
there is always among those countless objects of interest
one which is foremost, which exceeds all others in the
intensity and urgency of its affective value, and is for
the instant dominant. That is the focal point of conscious-
ness at the moment.

This is usually expressed by saying that the
' attention ' is directed to that object. The word ' atten-
tion ' is almost a superfluous word in psychology, and
it is certainly a nuisance and a source of confusion.
It is a surviving vestige of a * faculty of attention '
for which we have no further use. ' Attention,' far
from being a faculty, is an act, a reaction, and should
be a verbal noun ; it should properly not be ' attention,'
but ' attending.'

Attention is of two widely different kinds, corresponding
to two distinct types which characterize all our mental
operations, acts, thoughts : the directed and the spon-
taneous type. If a bomb suddenly explodes within twenty
yards of you, you will ' pay attention ' to it. Your
self-preservative impulses are at once put on the alert
and are directed in a lively manner to the object. Food
if you are hungry, water if you are thirsty, attract your
' attention/ acquire, that is, a preponderant affective
value, an interest beyond all other objects, become the
centre, the focus of consciousness. If on opening a book,
or your morning paper, you catch sight of an article on
a subject in which you are deeply interested, you will
read it with avidity, your ' attention ' will be sharply
focused on the subject. That is spontaneous attention ;
it is the natural operation of your impulses. Your
' attention ' in such cases does not require to be ' directed '

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 143

to a given presentation. Your impulse directs itself to
the object which most intimately concerns it, and the
focus of consciousness is thereby determined.

You may, on the other hand, be performing a task
which you have set yourself as a means to some end ;
the task itself may be pure drudgery, may be extremely
tedious and uninteresting. Your impulses are not in the
least implicated in the object directly in hand ; you are
going through the task as a matter of lamentable necessity.
In order to do it at all it is necessary that each step should
in turn become the focal point of your consciousness ;
your ' attention ' must be held to the task, artificially
directed to its objects ; and other impulses, other presenta-
tions which hover in the marginal field, are almost equal
in intensity to the artificially maintained focus ; and
the narrow margin of preponderance of the latter may
at any moment be overstepped, the spontaneous interest
violently confined in the marginal area may rise to greater
intensity than the artificial focus, which then becomes
marginal while the spontaneous interest becomes focal.
The attention is distracted. Into the mode of operation
of that artificial direction of attention identical with
the controlled direction of thought, of action we shall
not inquire for the present.

That focal consciousness, then, with its narrow field
of marginal consciousness, is what we call our consciousness.
It is our consciousness because it is focal and perifocal,
it is focal because it is the prepotent reaction between
the dominant conative impulse of our organism at the
moment and the object that derives its affective value
from its relation to that impulse. Now that position
is clearly a relative one. The psychic reaction which
occupies the focus of consciousness is but one of a
multitude of reactions that are simultaneously taking
place between the various conative dispositions of our
organism and ambient conditions. It differs from those
other psychic reactions solely in the circumstance that it

144 PSYCHE'S LAMP

has a higher (spontaneous or artificial) affective value.
That intensity is purely relative.

The absolute intensity of the focal consciousness varies
within wide limits. The sudden and unexpected menace
to our self-preservative instincts, as by the bomb, has
an intense value. The mental absorption of the thinker,
of Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse incognizant of
the invading Roman and of the sword held over his head,
is of high intensity. And in proportion as the degree
of that intensity exceeds that of concomitant processes
these are excluded from the field of consciousness. But
from that high intensity the focal consciousness may drop
to the most feeble, languid, and blurred condition of
dreamy faintness. You may have ' nothing to think of,'
you may be bored to apathy, your focal consciousness
may idly flutter about and busy itself for want of better
to do with the dancing mote or scudding cloud. The focal
consciousness at any moment may be by many degrees
less intense than the contents of marginal consciousness
at another time. The difference between the focal reaction
and all others is, then, purely relative, positional. In
all other respects, apart from that relative, positional
value, those psychic processes, the focal reaction and
the marginal ones, are identical in their nature and
operation. A psychic process is not rendered less intense
because another process happens to be of higher intensity,
any more than a building is made smaller by building a
higher one alongside.

What constitutes the limelight of focal consciousness
is the dominant impulse or interest of the actual (i.e.
active) moment, the matter in hand ; all psychism, as
part of the mechanism of action, being primarily con-
cerned with that. The ' limelight ' is turned upon those
mental processes which bear upon the actual matter in
hand, which are relevant, and it ignores and excludes
all others. The operation of that maximal impulse which
determines the focus of consciousness is thus selective.

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 145

That selection, that illumination, does not bring those
processes into existence or annihilate them, any more
than the sweep of a searchlight creates or annihilates
the objects which it illumines or leaves in darkness.
Those processes which are left in darkness, as not being
required in the reaction of the actual moment, do never-
theless continue to take place in relation to impulses
which, although in abeyance so far as present action is
concerned, are nevertheless operative. The rehearsal of
an important action which you are to perform to-morrow
occupies your mind, albeit some ' business in hand '
compels you to attend for the moment to quite other
things ; the care which you have ' dismissed from your
mind ' continues nevertheless to wear you down. While
you are reading this page and your consciousness is we
will suppose for the sake of argument focused on my
words, a thousand and one objects of consciousness hover
about that focus. You are at the same time raising
objections, and passing judgments ; you are thinking of
other views which you have read. And at the same time
you are ' conscious ' of the weight of the book the physical
weight, 1 mean of the chair you are sitting on, of the
light you are reading by, of the passing bus, etc., etc.
That appointment which you have to keep, and which
you might forget while idling your time away over a
book of psychology all those things and a hundred
more are hovering on the outskirts of your focal con-
sciousness, so close that the merest trifle will suffice to
make them focal and to cause you to fling your book
aside.

It is both a logical consequence of the constitution of
the field of consciousness, and a matter of common
experience, that mental processes of exactly the same kind
as those which occupy its focus take place even beyond the
indefinite and vaporous edge of its extreme circumference,
beyond consciousness. The name that you had forgotten,
the problem that you had dismissed from your mind,

10

146 PSYCHE'S LAMP

presently turn up recollected and solved by psychic
operations which have not occupied the field of conscious-
ness. You are surprised to find entering into the train
of your thoughts some word, some piece of information
which you have read or learnt 'without knowing it.'

In a sense well may those trivially familiar phenomena
seem surprising and upsetting, for they deal a death-
blow to all traditional misconceptions of mind, to the
conception that consciousness (i.e. focal and perifocal
consciousness) constitutes mind, that separate and distinct
entity and substance isolated from all else by impassable
gulfs. ' Unconscious mind ' is necessarily, to every con-
ception of traditional psychology, not only a highly
questionable, but a wholly inadmissible expression ; one
against which academic psychology has felt compelled to
lodge an emphatic protest.

But there are grounds more valid than the inviolability
of traditional definitions for declining to admit that pro-
cesses exactly similar to those which take place in focal
consciousness can take place apart from consciousness,
as, to use Mill's phrase, ' unconscious cerebrations.' For
if that were so we should at once be compelled to regard
all consciousness as superfluous, as an * epiphenomenon '
having no part whatever in the functions which it appears
to exercise. Such a view is untenable ; for it not only
would stultify all knowledge, but it would constitute
a unique breach of the most fundamental law of living
organization that no activity can develop that does not
serve the conative tendencies of living organisms. If
feelings could take place apart from consciousness, there
would be no alternative but to adopt the view that they
are mere shadows without use or significance. But there
is an alternative, the only one, apart from denying the
facts or calling them a ' mystery ' and it is to recognize
that focal and perifocal consciousness do not constitute
the whole of consciousness, and that the circumstance
that a psychic operation does not take place within that

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 147

' field of consciousness ' is no legitimate criterion that it
is not accompanied by consciousness.

And it is to that conclusion that the facts themselves
point. If it be admitted that each of the ten billion
protozoan cells which constitute the human organism
reacts individually to the stimuli, internal and external,
that affect it, then that reaction is, like all the reactions
of life, guided by feeling. The effect of light of the rod-
and cone-cells of the retina is not a purely physical effect ;
the effect of the pressure of a needle-point on the cells
of the cutis is not a purely physical effect. Neither the
gratuitous supposition that those impressions are trans-
formed into feeling in the brain alone, nor the very question-
able doctrine of specific energies, alters the fact that the
reaction of living cells, whether free or forming a part
of a metazoic organism, is not an inorganic phenomenon,
but postulates those adaptive modifications which are
the correlative of feeling. The feelings of the various
parts of the organism are only represented in central
consciousness as sensations when they are of use in
guiding the external motor activities ; where they cannot
be thus utilized they are not represented as sensations.
The viscera transmit no sensations to the central con-
sciousness ; visceral pain is not the direct effect of the
irritant, but of the contractions of the tissues in their
efforts to expel it. It is not as sensation, but in the
general affective tone of central consciousness which
determines the character of the reaction of the organism
as a whole, that organic feeling is there represented.
Presentative and cogitative processes are not attributable
to cell elements severally, for those processes require
the combined operation of a vast number of such elements
specialized in varied motor and sensory directions ; but
if thought were possible to the cells of the liver or the
pancreas we should know nothing of it, since it would
not be represented in focal consciousness except as a
determining affective value. In the brain countless

148 PSYCHE'S LAMP

psychic reactions are proceeding simultaneously ; and of
those processes only one can be focal. But that focal
consciousness, which we call ' our ' consciousness is but
one particular perspective, one particular point of view
determined by the situation of the actual moment
' actual ' in the strictest sense, that is, concerned with
the action, the reaction of the moment to external
circumstances. That consciousness is but an infinitesimal
fraction of the totality of psychic processes which take
place in preparation for action, and which are actuated
by every impulse manifesting itself in the organism.
' Our ' consciousness is an aspect of the psychic activity
of every living element of our organism ; but it is not the
whole of that activity.

The brain, and its amoeboid cells with their pseudopods
and tentacles, are not the seat of some unique and
mysterious power or principle, of a miraculous function
to be found there alone. Their function, however por-
tentous its results, does not involve any new activity,
but only the coordinated operation of activities and
powers which are inherent in all living substance. The
affective tone, the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction
of the conative dispositions which actuate all systems
of living energy, can, we have seen, be differentiated and
specialized into cognitive feeling. Affective tones, how-
ever complex, are reproduced in the reaction of any living
system to a situation or symbolic perception corresponding
to that affective value. That reproduction projects itself
into all the motor and sensory groups of elements that
are associated with the activity towards which that state
tends ; or, vice versa, any sensori-motor complex, such
as is called up by a word (the associated sound-symbol of
that complex) will reproduce the affective values of that
symbol, thus forming them into a concept. Every con-
cept is in ultimate analysis a complex of sensory and
motor presentations, and its physiological counterpart is
the activity of the cortical and thalamic cell-groups

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 149

which would receive the various sensations and correlate
the various movements which make up that concept.
Cognitive conation, urged by the interests of the moment,
can juxtapose any number of concepts, and in turn perceive
their likeness or unlikeness in respect to values determined
by the actuating interest, as the protozoon distinguishes
the likeness or unlikeness of two affective states.

It is as a resultant of primary activities that the age-
long elaborated experience of cognitive and motor acts
has been moulded into the instrument of the conative
tendencies inherent in all life, a functional and intermit-
tent and precarious resultant interrupted by states of
unconsciousness.

There are several ' theories of sleep ' which serve to
display the obscurity in which our conceptions of the
fundamental principles of vital reaction are still enwrapt.
The blood-supply of the brain can be shown to be in-
creased during the activity and reduced during the resting-
time of central consciousness ; and accordingly the theory
has been put forth that anaemia of the brain is the cause
of sleep. But the facts of blood circulation and pressure
are the same for every organ of the body ; each obtains
a larger blood-supply when it is active than when it is
inactive. To say that anaemia of the brain is the cause
of sleep is much as if we should say that congestion of
the brain is the cause of thought, or that increased blood-
supply to my muscles is the cause of my playing a game
of tennis, and anaemia of those muscles the cause of my
sitting down.

Others offer as an explanation of sleep the partial
intoxication or clogging of nerve-cells by their own waste-
products or by the acid waste-products thrown into
the circulation by the general activities of the body
(Preyer, Obersteiner), or the exhaustion of intracellular
oxygen (Pfliiger). Those again are not phenomena that
are peculiar to nerve-cells, they are common to all tissues.
The nerve-cells of the ganglia of bees and of sparrows

150 PSYCHE'S LAMP

have been studied after the day's exertion and after the
night's repose, and have been found to become shrivelled
and loaded with the accumulations of fatigue-stuffs. That
is as one would expect. But Claparede, on the other hand,
has pointed out with considerable elaboration that animals
and men settle down to sleep at given hours, whether they
are in a state of exhaustion or no, and that going to sleep
at certain intervals is a matter of habit, of instinct, the
utility of which is clearly to forestall actual exhaustion.
That view, which is manifestly in accordance with facts,
shows that we are to regard sleep not as an effect of exhaus-
tion but as an act designed to guard against it ; but it
does not tell us how that act is performed.

The only theory that does attempt to supply such an
explanation is that put forward by the great Spanish
histologist, Ramon y Cajal. According to his view,
supported by Duval, Waldeyer, Lepine, Lugaro, and
others, the dendritic fibrils of the cells of the cortex
retract during sleep sufficiently to break off their physio-
logical connection with other cells, and it is to that break
in the connection that the loss of central consciousness
is due.

Here we have a real explanation. The only objection
that has been offered against it is that it is not proved.
It is a matter of very considerable difficulty to render
visible by the most elaborate methods of staining the
minute arborizations of the delicate, translucent pseudopods
of dead nerve-cells ; it is, of course, out of the question
to observe living ones, in the higher animals at least.
Yet Waldeyer has actually succeeded in observing living
nerve-cells in a transparent crustacean, Leptodera hyalina,
and found the pseudopodial processes of those cells to
be as active during life as those of a rhizopod. Under
artificial stimulation those amoeboid movements have
been observed by Riichardt, Duval, and Kolliker. No
other view appears plausible than that the neurons of
the brain, those protozoa of thought, effect the connections

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 151

and concatenations upon which motor and cognitive
coordination depend by the movements of their pseudopods;
and it appears inconceivable that those delicate proto-
plasmic tentacles thrust in all directions, identical in the
minutest detail of their structure with the lace-like
pseudopods of a radiolarian, are in the living state
motionless and rigid structures such as we see them
silver-stained in the paralysis of death. 1

Cajal and Duval assume that in sleep it is the
connection between the terminal arborizations of the
afferent sense elements and the recipient cells of
the cortex and thalamus, that is dissevered, so as to

1 That the functional connection between one nerve-cell, or
neuron, and another is effected by the pseudopodial movements
of the cells themselves is further evidenced by the following facts :
Electrical stimulation of a nerve-fibre, that is, of the axis-cylinder
process of a neuron, is conducted equally well in both directions,
whether the cell have an afferent or efferent function. But if a
nerve-path including two spinal neurons, and where an interneuronic
junction is therefore interposed, be stimulated, conduction will
only take place in one direction ; the arborizations of the extremity
of the axis-cylinder of one cell being stimulated to effect a connection
with the body of the other cell, while the latter, not possessing any
arborizations in that direction, is unable to effect a connection with
the extremity of the axis-cylinder of the other cell. Where, however,
the arrangement is different, and both cells possess dendritic pro-
cesses at the same junction, as in the nerve-cells of Medusa, the
stimulus is propagated equally well in bnth directions.

Stoppage of the circulation, and the application of various poisons
only affect very slowly the conductivity of the nerve-trunk of a
cell to stimuli, but it almost at once abolishes the transmission of
a stimulus from one cell to another.

The latent period of reaction, that is, the time that elapses between
the application of a stimulus and its end effect, is greatly increased
by the presence of an interneuronic junction in the path of con-
duction ; and that delay is proportional to the number of such
neuronic junctions.

That the stimulus of functional activity is necessary in order
that nerve-cells should put out dendritic processes at all has been
shown by Berger, who examined the cells of the visual centres
of young dogs, some of which had been blinded from birth. "While
the visual neurons of the normal dogs showed the usual complex
pseudopodial arborizations, those of the blind animals had remained
embryonic and showed no trace of any pseudopodial processes.

152 PSYCHE'S LAMP

exclude sensory impressions. It appears, however,
more probable that it is between the higher cortical
centres of coordination and those below them, which are
actuated by the afferent somatic impulses of the organism
at large, that the break is to be sought. Insomnia is
of two types, the one connected with intense intellectual
or sensory excitement, where the higher coordinating
centres of the cortex and the sensory centres are highly
stimulated ; the other with intense emotional states,
grief, worry, joy, and every form of affective excitement.
In the one it is the activity of the intellectual centres
which prevents the disconnection, in the other it is that
of the afferent affective paths. In those conditions sleep
may be induced by fixing consciousness on an object of
no interest, an indifferent thought, or by monotonous
(but not by emotionally expressive) sounds, so as to
exclude intellectual and emotional interests from the focus
of consciousness. Similarly, artificial hypnosis is brought
about by fixing the attention on an object devoid of interest
or significance, such as a bright point and thus endeavour-
ing, as in going to sleep, to ' think of nothing at all.'

In dreams conscious operations are ' undirected,' they
are withdrawn from the coordinative influence of the
intellectual centres, from all habitual paths of word-
thought, of convention, in which it dwells during waking
life ; and the deeper conative impulses of the organism,
uninfluenced by the higher centres, have free play.

Similarly is the grip and dominance of the cognitive
cells relaxed in alcoholic intoxication ; the shackles of
routine and convention are loosened and the impulsive
forces which they smothered are set free. Under the
Dionysian inspiration man becomes himself and shame-
lessly begins to utter truth and be fearless. The natural
conative forces and living desires assume command of
their cognitive instruments of symbolic thought and
become creative, and the liberated man feels as if a god
spoke within him. Till presently the drugged organs are

THE ORGANISM AND CONSCIOUSNESS 153

further weakened ; the forces whose high developments
arose in relation to them, the higher avatars of the conative
impulses, are left without instruments ; only the lower
remain. The god sinks into the brute. The retracted
pseudopods of the bedoped cortical cells further shrivel
and shrink, and the beast sinks helpless to sleep off his
brief madness.

The deeper causation of our psychic life, the springs
of our activities, of our desires and motives, of our moods
and character, do not lie in the superficial realm of
perceptions and ' associations of ideas,' in that limited
realm of focal consciousness which was wont to con-
stitute ' the soul,' and was placidly introspected by
scholastic psychology as an isolated and self-contained
microcosm. Mental causation, the connection between
one idea and another, between one affective state and
another, between the various determinants and factors
of behaviour, the causes of our acts and thoughts, are
not to be found in that narrow realm. There are quite
other causes than the ' motives ' and ' purposes ' of which
we are aware, than the perceptible connections discoverable
by introspection. Of much more consequence in those
processes are physiological and biological laws and events
which are as yet entirely obscure to us. As, for instance,
the various protean transformations of the reproductive
impulse ; the rhythms and periodicities in all vital acti-
vities, of which the individual life, its cycle of youth,
maturity, age, and death, with their transformations,
is itself one. There is to mention but an instance
besides the daily cycle through which all our powers
and dispositions ebb and flow, a monthly periodicity
which was probably established when our ancestors lived
in an ambient of tidal waters, and which, far from being
confined to one particular manifestation in woman, is
of the first importance in the physiological and psycho-
logical state of both sexes. The determination and issue

154 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of our mental activities and behaviour is essentially
connected with such facts, and a thousand more which
our physiology and biology are scarcely even ready to
approach.

Nor is that all. The character of the dispositions
and activities of our organism is of necessity affected
by every physical agency that acts upon it, quite indepen-
dently of any perception or knowledge we may have of
that action. Atmospheric conditions, temperature, pres-
sure, moisture, electrical states and disturbances, have
their deep-working and inevitable influence upon all the
functions and reactions of our organism, and many of
us are well aware of the effect of those conditions upon
their functions and moods. The total disposition of our
organism, the source and determination of our feelings
and of our acts, are thereby modified. There is not, to
be quite consistent, an event in the universe which has
not its ineludible repercussion in the physical state of
our organism, and therefore in the constitution of our
mind ; the sun, moon, and planets inevitably exercise
upon every molecule and atom of our bodies, and conse-
quently upon the inmost springs of our soul, an influence
more ineludible than any ever dreamed of by astrological
fancy. The causation of our acts and of our thoughts
includes the entire universe.

CHAPTER VII
CONTROL AND FREEDOM

THE unity of a highly complex and differentiated living
organism, manifested in the minute precision of the
adjustments which coordinate the manifold activities of
its parts, becomes intelligible in the light of that funda-
mental principle which I have described in the foregoing
chapter as the Law of Equilibrium. We have now to
consider certain consequences of that law which give
rise to results of a seemingly opposite kind. How, for
instance, if the conative dispositions actuating every
reaction of the organism are identical throughout every
part of it, can such a thing as a ' conflict of motives '
take place at all ? Such a conflict within an organism
which is marked by the perfection of the self -adjustment
of every one of its activities to all others, is a fact which
ought indeed on any view to appear somewhat surprising.
Again, in accordance with that principle, we regarded the
activities of the central consciousness as fundamentally
determined, like all other functions, by the conative
disposition common at any moment to all parts of the
organism a view which led us to emphasize what in
the traditional language of dualism is spoken of as ' the
influence of the body on the mind.' But, while that
aspect is universally admitted, the converse aspect, ' the
influence of the mind on the body,' is no less manifest.
So much so that the central consciousness, hypostatized
into a distinct entity, ' the mind,' ' the soul,' has imme-
morially been conceived as ' ruling ' the body or ' earthly

155

156 PSYCHE'S LAMP

tenement ' in which it dwelt, using it for its purposes,
pulling, as it were, its various levers and springs, and
operating its various organs or instruments on its own
behalf. That primitive scheme, whatever modifications it
may in later times have undergone, still substantially
represents the vague current conceptions of psycho-
physiological organization. And, not only does it represent
the popular notion ; its influence can be traced in the
most fundamental principles of our scientific physiology,
however ' materialistic ' its professors. For ' the soul '
substitute the brain, and our most advanced physiological
science reproduces the antique Oriental picture of a
ruler who from his exalted seat imposes his will upon
the drilled and obedient multitude of his servants, sending
hither and thither orders and messages, ' nervous impulses,'
which direct and control, ' stimuli ' which set organs
working, ' inhibitions ' which veto their activity. Under
the hegemony of that supreme ruler are hosts of minor
potentates, ' controlling centres,' which in their own sphere
repeat the same autocratic rule ' control,' ' stimulate
and ' inhibit.'

Whatever the grounds that originally gave rise to those
conceptions, and the fantastic forms which they have
at times assumed, it would be idle to pretend that ample
colour is not lent to them by facts which are quite manifest
and most naturally lend themselves to that interpretation.
The central consciousness does appear to exercise a unique
controlling influence upon the bulk of the activities of
the organism.

There is, however, no contradiction between those
facts and the law of equilibrium. The reactions arising
out of the conative dispositions common to all organs
and functions differ according as the varied ambient
conditions of each part and the differentiated functions
which it discharges are different. In the vast majority
of cases no differentiation in specialized activity can give
rise to any conflict between one function and another,

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 157

or to the dominance of one organ over others ; for the
actuating impulse is the same in all. What is the
' interest,' the feeling, of one is likewise that of all other
organic elements ; and every mutual adjustment takes
place by virtue of that equalized level of the sources of
action, and of the feelings that represent them, throughout
all the constituent parts of the organism. Conflict and
dominating precedence can, however, arise in respect of
one function, and one function only, that, namely, of
cognition.

So long as an organism is actuated by pure impulses
alone and its consciousness is limited to pure feeling,
there can be no conflict of motives, no hesitation or
choice in its behaviour. The operation of two impulses
tending in opposite directions, such as a self-preservative
and a reproductive impulse, does not give rise to a conflict,
but to an automatic resultant depending upon their
respective strength in the circumstances of the moment.
The organism is an automaton. But every cognitive act
implies, as we have seen, a ' conflict of motives.' A
cognition is the substitution for the feeling of the moment
the primitive determinant of action of the presentation
of a prospective feeling which is not actually present,
but is impending in the future, of a hope or a fear for
an actual pleasure or pain. Cognition is a fundamental
modification of feeling, as feeling is a modification of
conation. But, apart from that inherent conflict between
a presented and an actual feeling, which attaches to all
cognition, it follows from the function of any element
cognitively differentiated that it exercises, by virtue of
that function, an authority over other elements. No
cognition can be transmitted organically as such. An
element or organ that fulfils that function does not, and
cannot, transmit ' information,' cognition, to other organs.
Only the conative tendency, the feeling that represents
it, can be transferred and distributed by way of organic
continuity. The organism is accordingly dependent upon

158 PSYCHE'S LAMP

its cognitive elements ; it must ' take their word,' so to
speak, rely on them, and conform in its attitude and
behaviour towards changes in its external relations to their
report. To determine these conditions and therefore the
attitude of the whole organism towards them, is precisely
the function of cognitive activities. Those activities are
actuated by conations common to the whole organism,
but the modification of behaviour brought about by
the cognitive reaction is determined by the organ of
cognition. Hence inevitably a privileged supremacy of
all cognitive elements.

In the cells around the mouth of the primitive metazoon
the efforts of the organism to discriminate and explore
the environment and the future are centred ; and in that
region all cognitive specialization will take place : the
body will be led by the head. With the extension of the
range of forestalling cognition and of the scope of means,
and the consequent multiplication of instrumental purposes
and possible action, that dependence is correspondingly
increased ; and so is at the same time the contrast and
conflict between the far-ranging presentations of cognition
and the actual feeling of the moment.

The neuro-muscular apparatus which comprises the
central nervous system and the sense-organs together with
the limbs and skeletal muscles, constitutes in the verte-
brates a single, structurally correlated organ of external
behaviour. The parts of that system operate, as regards
their specialized activity, not directly through the equi-
librium of the conative impulses of the organism, but
mediately through the motor cells of the brain, as a
single structural system. The dependence of that
apparatus upon the brain is quite different from the
dependence of the visceral organs on the brain. The
operation by which I move my arm, and that by which
my gastric glands are set secreting at the sight of food
are physiologically two utterly different operations. The
idea of a given movement can in the one case give rise to

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 159

that movement, for the ' idea ' is itself the activity of
the very cells in the motor areas of the brain which
produce it. Brain and muscular apparatus are a ready-
assembled machine whereby desire is transformed into
movement. And within that machine itself the con-
ception of a controlling brain is so far accurate. But the
brain cannot send ' orders ' to organs outside the neuro-
muscular apparatus ; there is no provision whereby the
brain can determine the secretion of the gastric glands.
These are stimulated, like the muscle of the arm, by the
' idea ' of food ; but what is transmitted to them by
the brain is what it transmits to every portion of the
organism, the affective change which that perception or
that presentation brings about. It is the equilibration
of the affective state of the whole organism, to which the
gastric glands react. Though both activities follow upon
an ' idea,' the one is said to be ' voluntary ' and the
other not.

It is the disproportionate development of the functions
of cognition and molar movement in higher organisms
that gives rise to the semblance of a supreme authority ;
but that authority is in reality exercised within the
special sphere only of one apparatus, which is itself but
the instrument of the conations of the whole organism.

That sphere of cognitive instrumentality has assumed
in the ' human faculty ' proportions so colossal that they
constitute a seemingly ' separate world,' in which the
focal consciousness has come to dwell almost exclusively.
Between that new world of cognition and the rest of the
organism an ever widening cleft has been opened. Intellect
is hopelessly isolated from the organism by a linguistic
barrier, it speaks a different tongue ; it cannot transmit
thoughts, concepts, judgments, words to the organism
which only understands the language of affections, of
feeling, of emotion. A solitude is spread around the
intellectual consciousness, the loneliness of the thinker.

Thus has come about in actual fact a separation, a

160 PSYCHE'S LAMP

contrast, an opposition, between the cogitating conscious-
ness and ' the body.' The latter has become ' the beast,'
and its spontaneous conative impulses have become ' the
lower impulses.'

The illusion thus created is, of course, an illusion merely.
The enormously hypertrophied functions and organs of
cognition are, for all their abnormal dimensions, but
organs of the body. They do not use the body as an
instrument, but, on the contrary, are themselves used as
instruments by the body ; for they are in fact actuated
not by any motive power peculiar to, and inherent in
themselves, but by the conative dispositions of the organism
as a whole. That ' separate world ' of theirs, as it has
come to appear, is nothing but the sphere of ways and
means by which the conative tendencies of the whole
organism, and not of the brain alone, are carried out. It is
to that sphere of means, of instrumentality in the operation
of impulses, that the world of conscious action is confined.
The contrast, the dualism, only exists between that vastly
extended sphere of means, and the obscurity, the uncon-
sciousness, into which the actuating forces are thus thrust
away by the conscious intellect.

It must not be overlooked, on the other hand, that
those hypertrophied organs of cognition are themselves
a part of the ' organism as a whole ' ; they too have
their share in the determination of the resultant of the
equilibrated conative disposition common to the entire
organism. That dispositon is perpetually modified in the
most momentous manner by the affective changes to
which cognition gives rise. Conation, we have seen, can
only become actualized through the self-revelation of
experiential proof. And it is accordingly by the gigantic
expansion of the field of experience in conceptual conscious-
ness that the conative dispositions of life are set free in
the vastness of a new world to assume the forms of new
appetences, of aspirations which transcend its primitive
organic forms, its physiological and instinctive reactions

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 161

fixed in primordial structure and function, and reduce
them to the status of ' lower impulses.'

Between those fixed dispositions and the forms of
conation developing in the opportunities of larger ex-
perience there arise of necessity ' conflicts of motives.'
Such conflicts are dependent, it must not be forgotten,
upon cognition ; they are not so much conflicts between
impulses themselves as between their claim to the present
means of operation, or their subordination to the future,
to a more remote realization. And it is the expansion of
the range of outlook, its pretension from the actual
moment to eternity itself, which gives rise to the com-
plexity and significance of the conflict. One and the
same impulse can quite well give rise to a conflict of
motives the desire, for instance, to have our cake and
eat it.

As a matter of fact a conflict of motives only does
arise in a situation that is new. In situations which
are familiar, habitual, nothing of the sort can happen.
We react to the familiar situation automatically, because
there is nothing in that situation to be cognitively dis-
covered ; cognition is not called upon to operate. And
accordingly between the perception of the occasion for
their activity and the reaction of our conative impulses
there intervenes no conflict, no deliberation, no conscious
psychological process at all. Introspective observation
searches in vain in such a reaction of our being for any
trace of a process of volition, for any manifestation of
' the will ' ; and we say that our behaviour is reflex,
is fixed in instinctive reaction, in custom, in habit. It
takes place without any intervention, except in the
recognition of the situation, of the processes of cognitive
consciousness. It is the straight-out reaction of our
established conations to the situation to which they are
already adjusted.

It is only when faced with a situation which is novel,
or is rendered so by the tampering interference of thought,

11

162 PSYCHE'S LAMP

that any conflict of motives ever does, or ever can, arise.
The conative dispositions of the organism are then called
upon to adjust themselves to a new situation, to devise
a new means of satisfaction, a new mode of reaction.
And it is that adjustment, that process of adaptation,
which constitutes the conflict of motives. The ' hesita-
tions ' of the organism are the oscillations in which the
equilibrium disturbed by the new cognitive experience
readjusts itself.

The inhibition by an unpleasant experience of an old-
established impulse can only be temporary. The un-
pleasant impression will, after a time, fade, and the
established impulse reassert itself. Only through repe-
tition can the modification be established permanently ;
and in general the more fundamental impulse which does
not mean the most habitually operative tends to prevail ;
as, for instance, the reproductive over the self-preservative
impulse.

The discussion of conflicts of motives has generally
been undertaken from the point of view of the moral
philosopher, and made an occasion to slop high sentiments
over moral values, to the detriment of the scientific
attitude. That brilliant and perverse writer, William
James, stamps his heels with fiendish glee on all logic
and science by proclaiming that the ' will ' of the hero
' follows the path of greatest resistance.' Such language
is doubtless edifying, but it is neither illuminating nor
true. The operation of motives is not a theme of ethics,
but of psychology, and all the phenomena of ideo-motor
conflict and inhibition are just as clearly exhibited by the
villain as by the hero.

There is no ' following the path of greatest resistance '
in any conflict of motives. Every one of us yields in every
moment of his life present satisfactions to perceived
future advantages. The ' sacrifice ' is even established as
a barely conscious automatic habit in all the drudgery,
the beseeming deportment, the conformity of our routine

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 163

of life. All human behaviour is governed by deterrents
and inducements, by hopes and by fears, by the prevalence
of prospective values over those of the moment ; and it
is the function of all cognitive processes to carry out that
substitution. The gold-hunter who faces the troglodytic
conditions of life in Alaska in the hope of making a for-
tune sacrifices the present to the future. And the entire
organization of capitalistic society is founded on reliance
on the psychological necessity of wage-earners to submit
to the utterly distasteful necessity of working, under the
pressure of the ideo-motor force of threatening starvation
and the inducement of wages. All inhibition of present
reluctance is governed by the powerful forces of induce-
ments and deterrents. That relation constitutes nine
hundred and ninety-nine parts of the mechanism of
human life. We do not what actual, present impulse
urges us to do, but what the ideo-motor power of induce-
ments and deterrents determines.

Psychologically every man has his price. Every one is
ready to bear present discomfort or pain in view of clearly
perceived advantage disproportionate to that discomfort
or that pain.

The moral philosopher's opportunity arises when the
determining inducement thins out from gross, obvious,
crude considerations of future consequences, on the same
plane as the values of the present situation, to motives
of attenuated abstraction. But there is no essential
difference in the psychological mechanism of the martyr's
choice and that of the most trivial foresight of daily life.

It is stated as a principle, and repeated in every psycho-
logical textbook, that abstract ideas have a more feeble
ideo-motor value than concrete ones. Now that is simply
not true. Men not saints or philosophers, but common
herds and crowds are constantly frenzied into fantastic
follies, reckless of all else, by abstract ideas. Abstract
ideas are, in fact, the only things except love that will
induce men to lay down their lives. The motive power

164 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of ideas, their efficiency as modifiers of action, does not
depend upon their being concrete or abstract, but in the
degree in which they are believed.

Belief is the condition of every idea's power as a
determinant of action ; and the degree of that power
depends upon the degree of belief. The whole end of
cognitive processes is to bring about a degree of belief
adequate to warrant action in accordance with it.
The supposed feebleness of ' abstract ' ideas as motives
has nothing to do with their abstractness, but arises
from the circumstance that, in most cases, abstract
ideas are not so vividly, so completely believed in as
concrete ones. We are extremely prone in the artificial
symbolism of our word-consciousness to profess belief,
to believe that we believe in notions which, in reality,
we believe in very imperfectly or not at all. The
professed belief, the idea which we choose to persuade
ourselves to believe that we believe, has, of course, no
ideo-motor force at all. The fact of belief consists wholly
and solely in its motive power. If we really do believe
in a notion, it matters not one jot whether it be abstract
or concrete ; of the two the abstract belief will probably
be the most intractable determinant of action. To the
ignorant martyr, to the Mahdist who rushes the machine-
guns at Omdurman, his convictions are an even more
powerful inducement than wages to the proletarian work-
man. And in the days when the latter believed in ' duty '
and in religion, he required far less inducement in the
form of wages. The ' will ' of the fanatic, the obstinacy
of the unthinking, is as the strength of ten because their
hearts are pure from doubting thought.

Uncertainty, hesitation, wavering, weakness of the will,
are introduced by thinking. The native hue of resolution
is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. With
intellectualism you have the true dissolution of the will,
the hesitancy of action paralysed by unformed and
qualified cognition. Your thinker is ousted in the field

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 165

of action by the curt decision of the individual of limited
and narrow thought, to whom his formulas are real, and
who looks with the contempt of the man of action upon
the ideologue.

But thought, while it is the shatterer of primitive
credulity and primitive resolution, is likewise the true
creator of the highest forms of will. ' Strength of will '
in that higher sense is the product of thought. If the
ideo-motor concept which conflicts with the present
impulse is the final conclusion of a full consideration
that has left no loophole for the ^consideration of
unforeseen aspects, its power is developed in its full
degree.

The methodological fault of the stereotyped psycho-
logical discussion on the ' conflict of motives ' situation
lies in confining consideration chiefly on the hesitating
mind at the moment when it is confronted with the
necessity of choice. It is not in the conflict itself, but
in its antecedents, that the determining action of ' will '
can be rightly appreciated. That ' will ' is a product
of cognitive evolution. The crux of its power lies not in
the conflict of choice, but in the antecedent process of
resolution ; it is the latter that bestows upon an idea
its ideo-motor power. The force of the will depends not
on any ' I will,' but on the thoroughness of our self-
analytic survey. If that has not been complete, if it has
not been sufficiently honest and sincere, a loophole is
still left for ex-tempore decision, and our ' resolution '
stands in danger of being a mere New-Year's resolution
subject to conflicts of motives. The assurance with which
you deal with a situation on principles the bearings of
which you have fully and maturely considered, is identical
with the assurance with which you speak on a subject
on which you possess full and detailed knowledge and which
you have long meditated. The strongest will is the most
deliberate, the longest will. Giordano Bruno, the supreme
historical example of the martyr's choice under the

166 PSYCHE'S LAMP

inspiration of purely abstract ideas, did not make that
choice in a moment of exaltation on the theatre of his
triumph, but daily and hourly during seven long years
of imprisonment in which every inducement was offered
to him to admit the expediency of a lie.

The same long-drawn process is exhibited in Plato's
account of the resolution of Socrates not to avail himself
of Crito's offers of rescue : " All my life, not only now,
I have been a man who can obey no friend but reason,
the reason that seems best to me after I have thought
the matter out. And the reasons I used before I cannot
give up now, because this has befallen me. I honoured
and reverenced them before ; they seem much the same
still. And if we have nothing better to bring forward
now, you may be sure I shall not give my consent." 1

' Strength of will ' consists in having completely ' made
up one's mind ' ; there is no other secret about it. All
the tasks, the aims, that we contemplate and which we
should desire to be sufficiently ' strong ' to achieve, are
in reality surprisingly easy of achievement. The one
condition required is that all other aims, all other tasks,
shall be ruthlessly discarded and set aside. Most people,
for instance, would very much like to become rich, and
they lament that they find it so difficult to make money.
Now it is one of the easiest things in the world to make
money. It is almost impossible to avoid becoming a
millionaire should one undertake the task. The sole
condition is that all other aims whatsoever shall be
surrendered. And that is precisely what prevents people
from becoming rich. Those weak-minded ones desire
wealth, but only as a means to other things. They would
like to make money and at the same time to enjoy it and
spend it. That, of course, is futile. If you wish to
make money you must not think of enjoying yourself,
of doing this, that or the other ; you must think of nothing
else, value no other motive than that of making money.
1 Crito, 46, b, c.

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 167

And you will inevitably become a millionaire with wealth
beyond the dreams of avarice, and not a notion of how
to spend it, not a possibility of any other satisfaction
under the sun.

So it is of every aim, of every task. Whether you
accomplish it and achieve your purpose does not depend
on whether you are endowed with a strong will or afflicted
with a weak one. It depends on whether you have once
for all clearly and beyond all possibility of repentance
estimated the value of the task to you, and decided how
much you are prepared to sacrifice to it. You have other
desires ; is your purpose of such value to you that you
will sacrifice those other desires to its accomplishment ?
If you have once clearly judged that it is so, that nothing
else, that purpose unaccomplished, will afford you true
satisfaction, that you can never repent that satisfaction,
that you must always regret the non-satisfaction of the
desire that urges you then, when opposing motives are
brought before you, there will no longer be any ' conflict
of motives/ none at least the issue of which can be in doubt.
You have resolved the conflict beforehand.

The drawback to all such focused volition is the very
sacrifice it entails. We can only have one character if
that character is to possess any ' strength ' ; if our
character is formed in the only way in which it can be
formed, that is, from a single point of view, it is necessarily
a horrible character from every other point of view. To
be many-sided we must be weak. Focus your character,
your aim, your conduct, and you have the squalid
destitution of the millionaire, the horrible selfishness of
the idealist. That is inevitable.

The old theologico- juridical notion that responsibility
depends upon knowledge is wholly justified. No ideo-
motor abstract can be prepotent over another, can prevail,
unless it is clearly known, apprehended, believed to be
in reality truer, higher, of higher value. In our criminal
classes the traditional notions of our morality are, of

168 PSYCHE'S LAMP

course, perfectly familiar ; but they are not believed.
The professional thief regards all the conventions of
property as but legalized theft ; his ' conscience ' holds
him perfectly justified, his only deterrent is the police.
To a society which is fundamentally immoral, which is
founded on principles which no longer inspire belief,
which have become transparent lies, it is impossible to
enforce its conventional morality. So long as theft,
adultery, murder, perjury, are legalized and justified
in a society, it is in vain for it to expect a moral stigma
to attach to particular forms of theft, of adultery, of
perjury, of murder.

The control of thought, the control of ' attention,'
consist in exactly the same psychological mechanism as
the control of conduct by the determination of an idea,
of a principle. In order to carry out any train of thinking,
a task must be set to thought. And the ' attention,'
the focus of consciousness is held to that set task by
the inducement or deterrent power of a consideration
which supplies the affective motive that makes the relevant
ideas focal, and prevents impulses which are tending to
break through the control of that idea from becoming
focal. Apart from that ideo-motor control which furnishes
a relevant, consistent, ' association ' of ideas, thought is
naturally rhapsodic, incoherent. Its ' associations of
ideas/ if undirected by the controlling influence of a set
task, will not be at all the Hartleyan laws of orderly
association, but will be supplied by impulses, secret,
maybe, and unavowed, which will use the kaleidoscopic
sequence of conscious presentations as symbols of their
affective states. Undirected cogitative behaviour is what,
but for the control of ideas, be they but the common
conventions of civilized deportment, the external behaviour
of a person would be who should walk the street and obey
every primordial impulse as it arose, until safely locked up.

It is one and the same mechanism that constitutes all
noetic psychic action from the dawn of cognition to the

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 169

highest human conduct the modification of immediate
reaction by the presented anticipation of a future and the
reflection of a past ; the influence upon the actual instant
of something which appears to exist only as a feeling,
an idea, a thought ; the effect of things invisible upon
things visible, of mind over matter. That control is
the expression of the time-protension of life by its per-
petual renewal ; and it is the character of its reactions
from the first rudiments of sensation to the human faculty ;
it is that pretension in time which, looking before and
after, stretches out the span of reaction from the present
instant to eternity ; it is psychic control, it is free-will.

The sempiternal question of free-will presents itself
under three main aspects : the first of these is a mis-
conception, a pseudo-question ; the second involves the
very foundations of our logic and world-conception ; the
third is a question of scientific fact.

If we put entirely out of consideration physical causation
and the extent to which the sequence of mental events
is bound up with it, we are left, nevertheless, with a
sequence of causation as definite as any which we may
recognize in the physical world and one, indeed, which
we have much more valid grounds for recognizing ; for
in the physical world we perceive the sequence merely,
whereas in consciousness we perceive not only the sequence,
but also the nexus in terms of psychological values between
one mental state and another. That connection is the
more manifest the more our mental processes are con-
trolled by a directing purpose or ideo-motor principle,
a cognition.

The fact of that coherent causal sequence is, by a
strange confusion, conceived to be in contradiction with
the notion of ' freedom.' That notion, and the whole
question as to whether we can lay claim to that freedom,
does not arise from any abstract idea of freedom, but
from a certain undismissible, intuitive sense which we
designate by that name. And it is with that sense or

170 PSYCHE'S LAMP

persuasion, and not with any abstractly defined ' freedom,'
that the causality of mental processes is in the first
instance contrasted. And that intuition which protests
against every discursive conclusion that would bely it
does not at all proclaim the anarchy of consciousness,
and claim it to be a delirium of inchoate inconsequence,
but, on the contrary, emphatically claims a sensible
orderliness, a discreet rule and power of determination.
It is not any abstracted theoretical ' freedom ' which our
common-sense demands, but the freedom of the will.
That expression belongs, unfortunately, to a primitive
faculty-psychology in terms of which we can no longer
think ; but it is perfectly clear that what is meant by
it is the control which a presentation constituting an
inducing hope or deterrent fear exercises over present
feeling and conation, the control which an idea exercises
over thought and action, the control which a set purpose
exercises over the sequence of our thoughts and acts.
But that relation is precisely the principle of causation
in cognitive consciousness. Our sense and intuition of
freedom is the consciousness of the psychological relation
between mental facts. We feel that sequence to be
governed by the psychological value of the facts just as
it appears to us in consciousness ; and that relation
constitutes our sense of freedom. In short, the sense of
freedom which we have, and which is so vivid that hardly
any argument can shake it, arises from that self-same
psychological causation which in our theorizing is opposed
to it, that is, to itself.

So long, then, as we confine ourselves to those intuitive
grounds on the strength of which we claim ' freedom '
for our ideo-motor control, far from there being any sort
of opposition between that intuition and mental causation,
the two are identical, and the latter constitutes the very
ground of our claim.

It is when we pass from that particular case of causation
to the principle of causality in general, and from the

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 171

particular intuition of freedom to the converse principle
of necessity in general, that we come upon a dilemma
which bears upon the particular question of our mental
causation only inasmuch as it bears upon every causation
and every event actual or possible.

We only know of such a thing as necessity as a logical
rule by means of which we operate for cognitive purposes
our processes of conceptual thought. Apart from that
technical use we know of no such thing in the universe.
When the notion is applied to the course of events which
we observe to take place uniformly, to the ' laws of nature,'
the predication is not only grossly illegitimate, it is wholly
inapplicable and essentially unmeaning. Whatever can
be deduced by virtue of logical necessity alone, exists
already in the data from which it is deduced ; and therefore
nothing can ever happen by virtue of necessity.

The only ' necessity ' known to us is logical and mathe-
matical necessity. But that is only the effect of the
groping feebleness of our mental processes, which compels
us to deploy and explicate what is all the while contained
in our premisses and data, and what we might see there
directly and immediately without any laborious explication
were our mental grasp a little stronger and our vision a
little keener. That logical necessity only comes into
existence from our intellect's need of a crutch. We
demonstrate at length what is implicit in our datum,
and thus draw from that a necessary consequence, much
in the same way as we use paper and pencil to ' work
out ' relations which with a little more acuteness and
concentration we might ' work out ' without that aid.
To demonstrate is merely to point out what is staring
us in the face. It requires a laboured demonstration to
show that a notion of ours is nonsense because it affirms
a thing and denies it in the same breath. But it is not
our demonstration per necessitate, that makes it nonsense ;
it is nonsense all along, whether we demonstrate it or no,
and whether the ' stupidity against which the very gods

172 PSYCHE'S LAMP

fight in vain ' can or cannot perceive the force of our
demonstration.

And so likewise when we explicate mathematically the
implicit consequences of our data, we are but spelling
out what has already been told us in those data. The
conclusion to which we arrive at the end of our calculation
is not the consequence of our calculation, but of our data
hence it is necessary. The data of the mathematician
always include all the powers involved in the .problem,
and also their qualities ; for mathematics can only deal
with quantities, and can therefore never evolve a new
source of power or a new quality of power from its data.
' Give me matter and motion, and I will construct the
universe,' says the mathematician. Allowing for the nai've
conception that ' matter and motion ' are the constituents
of the universe, what is meant by that feat is this :
' Give me all the powers of the universe and their qualities,
and also the " laws " of operation of those powers, that
is, the way in which those powers act ; give me also an
initial position or disposition of those powers from which
to start if you give me all those things as data, there
being now nothing else in the universe to give, I will pro-
ceed to perform the feat of constructing a universe which
is already constructed.'

The mathematical physicist's boast is inspired by his
knowledge of the laws of physical action, which since
he knows them he omits to mention among his desiderated
data. And it is those laws of physical behaviour which
he and others sometimes place in the same category as
mathematical necessity, reckoning them as parts of the
mathematical process and not of the data. But the
transfer of that crutch of our understanding which we call
necessity, and which is really implicitness, to the ' laws '
of the behaviour of things, is sheer confusion. A ' law '
is merely a description of the way in which things are
observed to act ; and there is not even the slightest
similarity between that behaviour and the apodeictic

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 173

implicitness of our logical and mathematical relations.
In fact, that description of behaviour, that observation
from experience and experiment, is always required by
the mathematician or logician, as a part of his data ; it
can never be evolved by deduction. The attribution of
necessity to events arose long ago as a mythological
idea ; events, instead of being regarded as manifestations,
signs, of power, were imagined to be, on the contrary,
subject to some power which the Greeks called Moira,
or Fate ; Christian science slightly altered that pagan
interpretation by saying that they ' obey laws.' To-day,
when mythological ideas have lost much of their force,
this is translated in most minds by imagining that,
although we are not able to perceive the ' necessity ' of
things behaving as they do, that behaviour is nevertheless
determined by a necessity similar to the implicitness
which we call logical necessity ; a view which is confirmed
as, with the expansion of our knowledge, one or several
laws become subsumed under more general laws, as, for
instance, Boyle's law under the laws of thermodynamics.
There is of course no perceivable ' necessity ' why stones
should fall to the ground instead of flying upwards or
remaining suspended in mid-air. And the circumstance
that they always do fall to the ground, or that they will
always do so throughout eternity, does not make the
behaviour one whit more ' necessary.'

Even that uniformity, which is loosely identified with
necessity, is only quite relatively known. Suppose there
is nothing extravagant in the supposition that the laws
of nature, the law of gravitation, say, were in process
of slow modification through the ages, so that the gravi-
tational behaviour of things would not be quite the same
now as it was ten million years ago ; we should be quite
incognizant of the fact, and should have no means of
discovering it.

It is otherwise, however, with the principle of causality,
viz., that everything must have a cause as distinguished

174 PSYCHE'S LAMP

from the principle of causation, viz., that similar causes
produce similar effects. Thai depends entirely upon
logical necessity ; and it introduces that logical necessity
into the entire universe. It introduces that necessity into
the whole universe because every event in the universe
is, by that principle, determined by the state of the
universe at the preceding moment, this again by that
of the moment before, and so on through an infinite
regression ; so that nothing can happen that is not
implicit in the state of the universe at any preceding
time, at its very beginning, if we suppose it to have had
a beginning. And it is this ' necessity/ this determinism,
which is the great logical obstacle to the concept of freedom
in the particular case of the events of our minds.

This necessity which attaches to the principle of
causality, and which imposes a rigid determinism not
on psychological events only, but on all events, not on
the events of this universe only, but of all possible and
imaginable universes, is a logical necessity, that is, it is,
like all necessity, a feature of our methods of cogitation ;
and, as I propose to show, it is nothing else, and can never
by any feat of legerdemain be transferred from the pro-
cesses of our cogitation to the objects to which they are
applied.

All cognitive experience being a sign of something else,
implies a cause of which it is the effect ; hence the infinite
regression of causality in time and also in being. While
we have no concept by means of which the infinite
regression in time can be arrested, the infinite regression
in being is arrested by the concept of an efficient cause,
a source of action, a power. That being reached as the
cause of all action, there is no need to go farther. Logical
necessity is attached to the principle of causality because
to repudiate it would be to admit that a new accession
of power could from time to time be introduced into the
universe from outside it, that is, from nowhere ; or, in
other words, that a new power could arise out of nothing

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 175

and be created. Now since it must come from nowhere,
that new power would have to create itself ; but in order
to create itself it would first have to exist, and it cannot
exist before it is created. In fine, the repudiation of the
principle of causality, which is a form of the principle
of conservation of substance, would amount to saying
that A is at the same time A and not-A.

It is by virtue of that logical necessary causality that
the mathematician is enabled to ' construct the universe,'
certain data being supplied ; that is to say, he will deduce
mathematically all the events of the universe, if he is
supplied with the data at a given moment. He is able
to perform that deduction because he can deal with
quantities, and the total quantity of power remains, by
logical necessity, unchanged. The claim to construct thus
the universe is the declaration of universal determinism.

But in order to perform that deduction and to justify
determinism, another assumption is necessary in the
mathematician's data, in addition to the postulate of
the conservation of substance, which is the only element
of the problem to which logical necessity attaches. Not
only must the quantity of power be given and invariable,
but also the quality of that power must be given and
invariable. By * quality ' of power is meant the manner
in which that power acts, the character or direction of
its action. That quality includes not only all the known
' laws of nature,' but all the ' laws of nature,' known and
unknown ; it includes not only a description of the
behaviour of energy in every existing circumstance but
also of its behaviour in any circumstance. In order to
' construct the universe ' and to justify determinism
those ' laws of nature ' must be (i) given, i.e. completely
known, and they must be (2) invariable. Otherwise the
task is impossible.

We have seen that we have no absolute guarantee that
the ' laws of nature ' are invariable. Assuming them,
however, to be invariable, they must also be completely

176 PSYCHE'S LAMP

known. If we knew all the laws of nature, we should have
a complete description of the way in which power would
act under any circumstances, a complete description of
its quality. We do not possess that complete description,
and failing that, we cannot proceed with our task of con-
structing the universe. Our knowledge of the laws of
nature is limited to a certain set of conditions, and any
departure from those observed conditions will entirely
invalidate our application of those laws. Before the
Newtonian formulation of the laws of gravitation, for
instance, we were familiar with the law that bodies fall
towards the ground. The behaviour of the moon and
the sun constituted a breach of our law of gravitation ;
they did not fall to the ground, whereas according to our
law they should have done so. A wider and more accurate
formulation of the law was necessary in order to show
that the apparent breach was in fact a consequence of
the mode of operation of gravitational force. The mode
of reaction of living organisms is different from that of
physical inorganic objects, and therefore constitutes a
breach of physical and chemical laws as we know them ;
therefore we do not know either the laws or the con-
figuration of living matter completely enough to apply
those laws.

Neither a variation in the laws of nature, nor a condition
not provided for in our knowledge of them, constitutes
a breach in the principle of causality ; for that does not
depend upon the invariability of the quality, but of the
quantity, of power. The former would constitute a breach
in the principle of causation, and would wholly stultify
our power of making use of its logical necessity. Under
conditions entirely different from those in which our
' laws of nature ' have been formulated, two things may
happen : (i) a complete change in the behaviour of power
may take place so as to constitute a breach of the principle
of causation ; or (2) the change in the behaviour of power
may simply be correlated to the peculiarity of the con-

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 177

ditions and be a function of the laws of nature as known
in other conditions.

In order that our construction of the universe, that is
to say, the proof of determinism, may be carried out, all
those data are required. Not only the invariability of
quantity, but also that of quality, is demanded ; and,
while the former is a logical necessity, the latter is not.
Our logical deduction proceeds not only upon the postulate
that no new power is surreptitiously introduced into our
data, but also that that power will always tend in the same
direction but for the modifications which are functions of
varying configurations (this in mechanics is expressed by
the first law of motion). But in circumstances differing
from those from which our ' laws ' have been formulated
the essential quality of that power which we do not
know may result in a breach of known laws ; and if
a change should, under those conditions, take place in
the quality itself of that power, so that its variability
will cease to be the same function of the configuration,
then, while the principle of causality will remain un-
affected, our logical deduction by means of its ' necessity '
will be stultified ; for a change will have taken place
which will not be included in our data.

Failing complete data as to how our power is going
to act under all circumstances, our ' necessity ' is left
' in the air,' a pure abstraction. And that ' necessity '
which we transfer from the principle of causality to events
amounts purely to this that any event is predicable
provided all the factors of that event are known. That
* necessity ' does not apply merely to the universe as we
know it, but to any universe that the most incoherent
imagination can devise ; it does not only apply to any event
that we can observe, but also to the most thaumaturgic
performance that can be conceived. It is a * necessity '
which is infinitely elastic. With all the data supplied
you can not only ' construct the universe,' but you can
predict the acts of an inebriate god.

12

178 PSYCHE'S LAMP

That ' necessity ' which is a character of every possible
and impossible event is not a characteristic of any, and
cannot therefore be opposed to any ' freedom ' which we
can conceive. But to say that an event is ' necessary '
because from the total sum of its constituent factors it
follows necessarily, is merely to say that having taken
place it cannot not have taken place ; for included in
the sum of its factors is the fact that the event will take
place when all the other factors are given, that is, the
event itself is one of the data of its own determination.
That c necessity ' does not lie in the event, but in our
groping analytical apprehension of it ; it is not a character
of any sequence, but a character of our cognitive processes,
which we transfer to the object of their investigation.
That ' necessity ' is an intellectual illusion.

The third and most concrete form of that illusion exer-
cises an unacknowledged influence upon its more general
aspects ; for psychical causation is tacitly assimilated to
physical causation and suspected of being ' governed ' by
the latter, which, being apprehended objectively, is
assumed to be unconnected with any psychical values,
and to proceed according to laws which are not those of
psychical causation. That implication is brought to a
sharp focus by scientific materialism.

Even dualism, except in its most extreme and mytho-
logical form, generally allows to-day psycho-physical
parallelism, namely, that to every change in conscious
processes there corresponds a change in the organism.
But it then follows that, if the laws of physics and chemistry
hold good in the physical organism, the sequence of mental
events must inevitably conform to the laws of physics
and chemistry. Any determinism to be found in the latter
must likewise apply in the same degree to the events of
consciousness.

When Victorian materialism emphasized that point of
view the scientific outlook was considerably simpler and
more sharply defined than it is to-day. ' Consider, for ex-

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 179

ample/ Victorian science would point out, 'the movements
of a planetary system. A planet is subject to innumerable
perturbations ; besides the larger movements of revolution
in its orbit and of rotation on its axis, it quivers and
deviates in countless ways. But every one of those move-
ments takes place in accordance with a definite and rigid
law, which we are able to formulate, which is very simple,
and which applies with mathematical accuracy. A planet
cannot move the millionth part of an inch out of its course
except in conformity with those laws ; its slightest quiver
is mathematically expressible and deducible ; the precise
position which it occupies at any moment is the mathe-
matically exact resultant of rigidly operating relations,
so that from the slightest disturbance we can with secure
confidence deduce the nature of the disturbing cause, as
did Le Verrier and Adams when they discovered the
planet Uranus without setting eyes on it. Our own
organisms are composed of exactly the same substances
as the material world, and their atoms and molecules
must therefore move in a manner as rigidly uniform as
do the planets, although we are not able to observe those
movements and to formulate their laws so fully. It
follows that when we appear to choose a course of action
according to the value of a feeling, an idea, a presentation,
a thought, that is a delusion ; for the molecular phenomena
in our organisms proceed according to laws which admit
of no alternative. And we are driven to conclude that
our material movements which are governed by the laws
of physics and chemistry would take their course in
exactly the same way as they do, and that we should
behave exactly as we do, if we had no feelings, no ideas,
and no thoughts.'

Apart from the numerous assumptions contained in
that argument, Victorian science in propounding it
ignored its own most glorious achievement. For by
treating the molecular dynamics of living organisms
as equivalent to the dynamics of a planetary system it

180 PSYCHE'S LAMP

set aside the conception of evolution. It assumed that no
fundamental change has taken place in the behaviour of
natural energies during the evolution from the simpler
to the most highly organized forms of material configura-
tions. We realize to-day much more vividly than could
have been done in the days of Liebig, Vogt, Huxley, and
Tyndall, that a very far-reaching evolution has taken
place in the conditions and constitution of material systems
between those observed in the movements of a planetary
system and those taking place in the molecular systems
of living matter. It is a far cry from the simple gravita-
tional movements of the former to the complex intra-
molecular changes in the latter, and to draw conclusions
from the one to the other is, to say the least, highly
hazardous. But from the point of view which physical
science has now reached the two processes are not even
parallel and strictly comparable, and the conclusions of
Victorian materialism are not only hazardous but positively
inapplicable. Those * laws of nature ' which are the
formulas for the movements of large masses, the laws of
gravitation, of molar dynamics, of hydrostatics, of pressures
and temperatures, of radiation, appear to us to-day in
the light of statistical laws, of resultant averages ; and their
simplicity, their uniformity, are but the total effect of a
multitude of minute actions which are themselves neither
uniform nor simple, but infinitely varied. The laws of
intra-molecular changes are not the laws of observable
molar changes, which result from the mutual neutralization
of molecular actions into a simple and uniform average.
Those molecular actions assuming the ultimate quality, or
* law,' of their constituent energy to be itself invariable
must vary according to the internal constitution of mole-
cular systems, which is becoming exceedingly complex.
The simpler the molecule, the simpler and more ' uniform '
its action ; the more complex the molecule, the greater
the variation in effects produced by very small causes,
the greater, that is, the deviation of the system from the

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 181

statistical law. The ultimate character of the constituents
tells on the result in proportion to the complexity.

The fundamental conditions and constitution of the
protoplasmic system of energy are admittedly as unknown
to us as in the nineteenth century, but the progressive
complexity lability, and instability, that have led up to
it are more fully apprehended. Whatever our ignorance
of the exact chemical and physical conditions of living
matter, the very fundamental difference which I have
pointed out, namely, that by virtue of the power of rebuild-
ing the configuration of energy destroyed in each reaction
a living system is the only one in which a reaction can
be repeated and modified, is an observable fact. That
circumstance alone precludes the assimilation of the organic
molecular system to the planetary or any other inorganic
system, for the difference between them is precisely that
the one can be modified and the other cannot. That
modification which does not take place in inorganic
systems, is the concomitant of feeling, and of presenta-
tions which are modifications of feeling.

Our behaviour is modified by feeling and can be modified
by presentations, and it is that relation which constitutes
psychic causation or * freedom.' The causal values of
presentations differ completely from the causal values of
molar physical factors, but there is no valid ground for
supposing that they therefore differ from the physical
causal values of biochemical factors ; for to the difference
in the physical conditions and configurations of those
factors there must needs correspond a difference in their
causative action. Travelling to a given place in a strange
country, I come upon cross-roads ; I turn to the right,
but after proceeding a little way I meet an inhabitant
and gather from him that I should have turned to the
left. I retrace my steps and follow the other road. The
changes in the movements of my body are physical
events quite similar to the perturbations, of the planet
Neptune, and the whole process, like the astronomical

182 PSYCHE'S LAMP

disturbance, can be considered from first to last as a purely
physical process, every psychical aspect being eliminated.
But if that process of redistribution of energy be considered
thus, it will be found that the causal values of the factors
are entirely transformed. In terms of massive events
and of observable physical laws there is no expressible
relation between the waves impinging on my tympanum
and the changes in my movements. The sounds may
be shrill or deep, high or low, short or prolonged, the
articulations may be those of Dutch, Greek, or Arabic
words ; instead of being spoken, they may be written in
black on a green board, or in green on a black stone pro-
vided the words are understood, the result will be exactly
the same. The process to which that physical cause gives
rise in the organism is not only unlike the process of
gravitation or any other molar event, it is, in a sense,
the exact opposite. The physical effect of sound-waves
on a molar mass, and in fact on the membrane of the
tympanum, is a series of harmonic vibrations, the factors
of which are the tension, elasticity, weight, etc., of the
vibrating mass ; that is, the whole process depends on
the summation of the elements of the mass affected,
just as the gravitational force acts on the planet as if
the total mass of its varied elements were concentrated
at the centre. Whereas that process is the result of
a statistical levelling down of a multitude of molecular
actions to an average, the organic process is the outcome
of a series of selective reactions, in which the resultant
direction is determined by the choice by each element
of one direction of action out of a number of possible
directions. The cells of the auditory organs select certain
of the impinging waves ; the cells of the auditory centres
select certain effects of the auditory stimulus, and select
the path of their transmission to the cells of the speech
centre ; these further select the paths of association with
other sensory and motor centres ; and finally a selected
group of motor cells selects the paths of motor stimulation

CONTROL AND FREEDOM 183

to certain muscles, the coordinated contractions of which
give rise to the modification of molar motion. That
process is the reverse of the molar reaction ; instead of
the diverse activities of the elements being statistically
integrated into an algebraical average, so that their
differences are eliminated in the combined result, the
physical stimulus is, on the contrary, redistributed among
a succession of highly differentiated elements, so that it
is transformed into the specialized activity of those several
elements. Those intricate selective actions and special-
izations are themselves the outcome of countless similar
selective actions reaching back to the beginnings of life.
tDwing to the continuity of those reactions, which are
successive modifications of one another, the entire past
of the organic system is coordinated with the actual,
or active, present impulse which tends in a given direction.
A complete transformation of the values of the external
physical impulse is thus effected.

The old joke about the ' movements of molecules being
transformed into feelings ' is a metaphysical chestnut
which has ceased to be amusing ; what is transformed
into feeling is not, of course, the movements of anything,
but the causes of movements, that is, impulses to move-
ment, and that is equally true in physics and in psychology.
' Moving particles ' are but the sensorily conceived signs
of the sources of action. To imagine that your thoughts
and your behaviour must be * governed ' either by the
* laws ' of physics and chemistry or by your feelings and
presentations, is a mere muddled assumption compounded
of secular misconceptions. What ground have you for
supposing that the two are different and must have
different results ? The ' laws ' of chemistry and physics
are but the description of the behaviour of objects ; no
observation or description of the behaviour of molecular
matter in living objects is available. It must, according
to the principles of physical causation, and does in fact,
as evidenced by the molar behaviour of living organisms,

184 PSYCHE'S LAMP

differ radically from our observed and described inorganic
behaviour. That difference is, according to physical
principles, a function of the difference in configuration
of the systems ; it may be the same function of that
difference as in inorganic systems, or it may be a quite
different function. In the first case the organic behaviour
would be describable as a ' law ' from a complete know-
ledge of organic configurations and our knowledge of
inorganic physical and chemical ' laws ' ; in the other
case new equations would be necessary in order to subsume
both inorganic and organic laws under a more compre-
hensive formula. In either case there is no ground what-
ever for supposing that those ' laws ' of behaviour differ
from those of psychical values.

That much is profoundly illusory in the apparent
determination of behaviour by the forms of consciousness
is what has been repeatedly emphasized in the present
work. All those processes which constitute our conscious-
ness can but give effect to impulses which actuate us and
which are not themselves conscious. But that the modifi-
cations brought about by affective and cognitive values
really correspond to the relations which those values bear
in consciousness and that relation constitutes the whole
of our intuition of freedom is a fact which is not invali-
dated by any of the arguments upon which necessitarian
conceptions are founded.

CHAPTER VITI

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY

THE tendency and character of those forces which cause
our actions and the phenomena of our consciousness are
only known to us by their effects as our behaviour, and
by their affects as our feelings. From those concrete
and particular manifestations we may, by a process of
inductive generalization, describe the ' character ' of
animated beings in the same manner as we describe the
' properties ' of inorganic substances. From the fact that
we are pleasantly affected by certain auditory experiences,
say, and unpleasantly by others, we are led to say that
we like music and dislike noise in general. Our self-
knowledge, like all our knowledge, proceeds from the
particular to the general. And we have no other ground
than such inductions for any general description of the
impulses which actuate us, and which are as obscure
to us as is the general tendency the absolute tendency,
or * first law of motion ' of the forces which give rise
to chemical or electrical phenomena.

By a wider generalization all the tendencies manifested
in behaviour appear to fall pretty obviously into two
classes according as they have regard to the interests of
the individual himself or to other, extra-individual, in-
terests. The latter can be, and usually are, subsumed under
the former. In order to act as a motive at all every value
must be an individual value, every interest must assume
the form at least of an individual interest. There can
be no such thing as a purely altruistic motive ; from the

185

186 PSYCHE'S LAMP

moment that any consideration should show itself as
wholly and purely altruistic it would thereby cease to
be a motive. It is accordingly easy to show that every
altruistic or extra-individual motive reduces itself to a
form of individual interest. Thus the function of pro-
creation, the type of a racial, extra-individual impulse,
with all the extreme individual sacrifices which it entails,
is really governed by an individualistic interest, and may
be regarded as an assertion of individual power, an impulse
to perpetuate the character, the type, of the individual.
All ethical altruism is readily explained as enlightened
self-interest ; all other-regarding motives are reducible to
terms of egoism, and can be shown to present themselves
in fact as more or less direct forms of egoism in order
to operate as individual motives. The supremest sacrifice
must appeal in some manner to the individual that makes
it ; he does, after all, nothing but what he likes. All
conduct, whether on the human or on the animal plane,
is interpretable in terms of egoism, and is constantly so
interpreted with a logic which embarrasses refutation.

That interpretation is painfully confirmed by our
familiarity with the prodigies of human selfishness. We
see men hacking their way to what they deem their
personal advantage regardless of every other consideration,
paving the path of their cupidity with the lives of their
fellows. We know the appalling crudity and cruelty
of ultimate conscious motives, and we know also something
of the egoism that disguises itself under hypocritical
professions and sentiments. We are easily led to conclude
that the human world, no less than the animal world
which is red in tooth and claw, is, to be perfectly honest,
a manifestation of pure, savage, ruthless, cruel egoism,
and that to pretend that it is otherwise is but an attempt
to throw mawkish sentimental dust into our eyes.

And yet, in spite of that seeming obviousness, a more
fundamental consideration will, I believe, show that if
the two orders of motive tendencies be reducible to one,

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 187

it is not at all under the head of egoism, but under that
of extra-individual impulses, that they are subsumable.

An ambiguity lies at the root of the egoistic interpre-
tation. The distinction between self-regarding and other-
regarding impulses does not at all correspond to what we
commonly term selfishness and altruism. It is, of course, a
dynamic necessity that all motives whatsoever, in so far as
they are conscious at all, should appeal to the individual in
terms of his interests. He does what satisfies his impulses,
and in so far acts egoistically ; and no motive which is
effective can escape from the circle of that egoism. But
it does not at all follow that those motivating impulses
are therefore self-regarding in their tendency. The actual
goal of the impulses which actuate us is, as we have
seen, not represented in consciousness ; what is present in
consciousness as the ' motive ' of action, the satisfaction
sought, is something quite different from that goal. There
is no impulse in living nature more blindly selfish than
that of sexual love ; it is ruthless and unscrupulous,
it operates as an egoism more self-centred than hunger.
There is no instance in nature of more cynical callousness
than the sadic love of the bee or the spider. And yet
that impulse is the clearest and most direct manifestation
of an impulse which is race-regarding, and which utterly
subordinates the individual to the race, sets him aside
and unflinchingly sacrifices him to the race-purpose.
The man who sacrifices all his human ties and obligations
in order to follow the imperious behest of an obsessing
idea is judged a selfish man. But the impulse that
animates him is of the most intensely extra-individual
import. The satisfaction of the impulses of the individual
is not by a very long way the same thing as the advantage
of the individual. To imagine that the two are identical
is the grossest possible misunderstanding of the most
fundamental and elementary facts of psychology.

That the individual acts ' selfishly ' or ' altruistically '
is no criterion of the self- or other-regarding nature of

188 PSYCHE'S LAMP

the impulse that urges him. The presented value of the
motive in individual consciousness and the character of
the impulse he obeys are two quite different things. We
now know that the urge of the impulses which actuate
living organisms is, so far as the consciousness of the
organism is concerned, blind, and that the form of conscious
* motive ' under which they may present themselves to
consciousness has nothing whatever to do with the
direction of their tendency, their teleological value.
That an individual acts from a motive which is to him
purely selfish is no criterion of the end and utility of the
impulse which actuates him. His own attitude may be,
and in most cases is, grossly and frankly egoistic, but the
value of his selfish impulse may at the same time be purely
that of a race-interest. The moral psychologist is fond
of gushing sloppy sentiment on the maternal instincts of
the hen. Does anyone seriously suppose that the hen is
actuated by sloppy sentiments ? Does anyone, a fortiori,
suppose that she has any conception of the * interest of
the race ' ? She is actuated by no sentimental or theo-
retical considerations, but by impulses that are ' blind,'
that is to say, unpresented in consciousness except by
instant feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness. That
in no way alters the fact that this blind impulse is
indubitably related to ends in which the individual hen
counts for nothing, and which have regard to a horizon
of life-purposes in which her ' interests ' are irrelevant.

Nor is the contrast one between the cruelty of selfish-
ness, and the loving-kindness and self-sacrifice of altruism.
As a fact the race-impulse can be, and usually is, a
thousand times more cruel, more callous and more ruthless,
than any individualistic egoism. What we associate with
the heartless cruelty of nature her disregard of the
individual is a manifestation of racial, of extra-indivi-
dualistic impulses. There is nothing more cruel than the
' altruism ' of extra-individual impulses.

The crudest individual impulse of life, the ' instinct

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 189

of self-preservation,' may, on the other hand, be quite
opposed to the individual's interests, may be so even
manifestly in his own consciousness and judgment.
The man condemned beyond hope to utter misery and
suffering, and impotent uselessness, even while clearly
realizing his situation, clings to life, and calls himself a
coward for so doing.

All creative activities are pursued in general in a purely
selfish spirit ; the artist, the creator, seeks the satisfaction
of certain cravings for expression and perfection of pro-
duction, sacrificing many things to that individual satis-
faction, discarding the call of obligations. But that true
expression and creative work should take place is not
the interest of the individual, but of the race ; the artist's,
the scientist's, the philosopher's stake in their work is
as nothing compared to the stake in it of the race. All
art is race-regarding in its nature ; it is one of the most
essential elements and means of the education, the devel-
opment, the evolution of the race. The share represented
by the individual satisfaction of the artist, obtained at
the cost of pangs and travails that seem to consume
his very life, is as nothing beside its value to the race.
His labour is at once as selfish and as altruistic as the
mother's care for her offspring.

The writings of Freud and Jung have of late popularized
the notion that many manifestations of conative, affective,
imaginative activity are transformed aspects of the sexual
instinct or, as it would be more correct to say, of the
reproductive instinct, for sexuality is only a special form
of it. That notion was familiar enough to psychologists
before Freud. It is a matter of easy observation that in
many cases religious emotion, artistic, intellectual emotion
and creative activity, are interchangeable with the mani-
festations of the reproductive instinct. They take its
place and it may take theirs. They are channels along
which flow the same ultimate forces, which appear to
assume now one form and now another. The ecstasis

190 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of the religious mystic gives expression to reproductive
impulses which his or her asceticism holds suppressed ;
and in the more morbid forms of religious hysteria the
intimate connection is revealed beyond the possibility
of mistake. So all art, all the highest forms of pictorial
expression, of poetry, of emotional literature, all music,
are suffused with the eternal theme of sexual love. They
are, like the displays of colour and song in animals,
expressional manifestations of the same impulse which
perpetuates the species. To the Oriental, whose vision
is not veiled by the primness of our conventions, all our
art and music appear at their face-value for what they
are purely erotic. The whole affective life of man is
coloured with the hues of those emotions which naturally
associate themselves with the transmission of life, with
the race-impulse in the most concrete aspect of its
function.

Rather than say, as we have been in the habit of saying,
that those manifestations are disguised sublimations of
the sexual impulse, it would be more exact to say that the
whole range of creative manifestations, together with those
which have more directly to do with the reproductive
functions, are all aspects and forms of the one primary
impulse. Artistic or mystic emotions are not ' trans-
formed ' or ' disguised/ or ' sublimated ' concupiscence,
but various manifestations of an impulse which is the
common source of all. They have the common character
that they are in their import and scope race-regarding,
other-regarding, extra-individual, impersonal evolutionary
impulses. In all those activities the individual is the
instrument of the evolutionary forces of the race and
of Life.

The artist, the thinker, the scientist, are occupied with
aims which concern the race more than the individual,
which are not ephemeral and contingent, but abiding.
They are engaged in creating the racial mind, the future
a creative, a reproductive act in no less strict a sense than

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 191

the bringing forth of a human organism. The artist is
consumed with a desire to express himself ; and what is
that act of expression but the communication to others,
to the race, of what he accounts most valuable in his
field of vision ? What is the goal of that impulse but
the impregnation of the mind of humanity with his own ?
However solitary and self-absorbed his labours, however
isolated and insulated his thought and with the jealousy
of a lover the true thinker ever seeks to insulate thus
his creative act from all contamination it is to the race,
to humanity, to the future, that, unknown though it be
to himself, what his mind brings forth is addressed. What
concern has he in the past or in the future of humanity,
in its redemption, in truth, in sounding the abysses of
universal questions ? What's Hecuba to him or he to
Hecuba ? Those interests hold him, possess him, obsess
him ; he enjoys the little honorary, nominal fees of joy
in his work, pride in it, the little pleasures of vanity ;
or suffers with equal readiness the insults of ignorance
and stupidity, the scorns of the unworthy, the rancour
of prejudice, and the patronage of fatuous misunderstand-
ing. Paltry fees, and squalid martyrdoms ! Assuredly
they are not and cannot be weighed as factors in the
motive powers that urge him to consume the inmost
energies of his life. A far deeper, more potent force,
despotically impels him unknown to himself, as it impels
the gnat to give its life in an embrace.

No creative act, no real work at all, is in its nature
self-regarding. Indeed, as in his creative acts, so in
the whole of his activities, the individual is moved by
forces which are equally unperceived by him, and which
use him merely as their instrument to ends that extend
far beyond his sight. Those forces, in fact, care little
at all for the individual ; those cosmic forces treat the
individual with utter disregard and indifference. That
he should be impelled to ' self-preservation,' that he should
cling to life, to the means of existence, that he should

192 PSYCHE'S LAMP

seek to extend his powers and assert himself in his genera-
tion, are necessary conditions of his acting at all. But
never does he find it possible to live by that bread alone ;
the values of life bear the hues of aims which extend
out of the sight of the individual. Confine him within
the circle of that self-preservation, and he inevitably
pines, mortally suffocated. Feed him, warm him, shelter
him, ' preserve ' him, furnish him with all the necessaries
of individual life, and he will go mad or commit suicide.
Creation, were it but the crude reproduction of his own
kind, becomes, in the absence of any other manifestation
of the life-force, the centre of all life's values. To those
creative ends, to those evolutionary ends, are his self-
preservation, his clingings to every straw of life, subsidiary
and subservient. And when the powers of racial use and
import are exhausted, when he has ceased to be in mind
and spirit creative, even the self-preservative life-instinct
as a rule vanishes or becomes enfeebled ; his clinging
grasp relaxes, and he is ready to take his departure.

It is, when properly considered, a rather preposterous
notion that those forces which act through the individual,
of whose real import and end he is totally unconscious,
whose origin lies in a remote and long regression of
evolutionary development, are in the least concerned
with the individual, are in any respect individual-regarding.
Such a conception appears, when we come to face fairly
its prodigious impertinence, as the anti-climax of anthropo-
centrism.

Those diversified impulses that make up our ' being '
are the stratified accumulation of the concrete forms
assumed by the primal tendencies of life under the
operation of affective and cognitive experience. Not one
of those forms is itself innate and original ; all are
necessarily developed in reaction to feeling and cognition ;
all are necessarily ' acquired.' Without affective and
cognitive experience no concrete appetence, no specific
impulse, can arise at all. Hunger, for instance, is beyond

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 198

dispute not primary ; it is a special developed instinct
of plasmophagous animality ; it is unknown to the quietly
and continuously breathing and light-absorbing plant-
life out of which animality became differentiated. Love
is no less an acquired instinct ; sexuality is not primary,
but a developed adaptation, a division of labour. The
breath itself, the spirit, is not primal ; there are organic
forms which do not breathe oxygen saprophytic bacteria,
yeasts, that contrive to metabolize by way of fermentative
processes and dispense quite well with air. Not one
impulse of life can be discerned to be primary, innate,
original, and inseparable from the attributes of life.

The distinction between self-regarding and other-
regarding impulses does not appear to exist at the origin
of life. In plant-life structural provisions and reactions
for self-preservation would seem, with a few rare excep-
tions, as in sensitive plants, to be entirely absent. The
plant does not protect itself, shows no defensive instincts,
evinces, so far as structural provisions and behaviour
indicate, no objection to dying. Its structural reactions,
its organic cunning, are, on the contrary, wholly directed
towards reproduction ; individual-regarding provisions
and impulses would not appear to exist in the original
disposition of life. Extra-individual impulses have not
been, it would seem, evolved by a process of sublime
sentiment from a fund of original egoism, but on the
contrary, they are the dominant, original impulses of life ;
and it is self-preservation, the individualistic impulse,
which has been derived out of them. Self-preservation,
like hunger, is probably a special invention and attribute,
a sort of perverted instinct, of predatory, cannibalistic,
combative animality. The instinct of self-defence has
arisen as a correlative of the instinct of attack.

Whatever the nature of that tendency which constitutes
the quality of the impulses of life, it is clear that it is
not concerned chiefly with the individual. The problems
of behaviour present themselves to us accordingly under

13

194 PSYCHE'S LAMP

a new aspect. For individualistic philosophy the problem
was, ' How can extra-individual motives arise out of
individual motives ? ' For us the problem is rather,
' How can individual motives arise out of extra-individual
motives ? What is the nature of egoism in an organism
which is entirely ruled by impersonal forces that care
nothing for the individual ? '

There are certain types of behaviour, thrust prominently
upon our notice in the present phase of human development
and social order, to which we refer by the woids ' selfish-
ness,' ' egoism.' In order to understand those types of
behaviour we must regard them in a somewhat different
light from that in which we are accustomed to view them.
Egoistic behaviour is not merely behaviour resulting from
motives of self-interest, for all motives, in order to act
at all, must appeal to individual interest ; that is the
condition of their operation. It is not merely behaviour
characterized by callousness, cruelty, defect of sympathy ;
some of the most purely extra-individual impulses exceed
all others in cynical cruelty, in the complete absence of
the feeling of sympathy. The behaviour which we call
selfish and egoistic is certainly not characterized, or
psychologically explained, by those descriptions. It is
a pathological condition consisting in a particular atrophy
and degeneration associated with otherwise advanced
conditions of development.

The crudity of egoism which we lament, and which is
sometimes ascribed to ' human nature,' is the product of
certain conditions, namely, the structure and mode of
evolution of our social order, on which is imposed strife,
conflict, as a supreme law. A consuming disease is thereby
engendered panic fear, which is the ruling emotion in
all competitive conditions. In the social psychology
thus created by the organization of terrorism, the de-
fensive, self-preservative instincts are naturally, as in
hunted beasts, stimulated to the utmost and suffer from
a chronic pathological hypertrophy. We are sometimes

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 195

naively surprised to discover that the self-making man
who coldly employs himself in crushing human lives on
a large scale and despoiling widows and orphans is, in
his family circle, the mildest and tenderest of men, acutely
affectionate and sensitive. Naturally ; it is the social
order alone which evokes the pathological reaction of the
self-preservative instincts not ' human nature.' The
general result of that hypertrophy is that all other
tendencies and affections are stunted, starved, atrophied.
When he has secured himself and satisfied his animal
instincts, the victim of panic has no interests in this life,
and his tastes and satisfactions are those of a Hottentot
or a baboon. It is that atrophy which manifests itself
in the baseness, the vulgarity, the sottishness of the
mentality associated with our commercialism. It is
worse than wicked, it is vulgar. It produces not so much
indignation as disgust. The likes and dislikes of the
competitive animal are bestial.

Self-preservative egoism is developed, like every instinct
in life, in response to the need for it ; the greater the
danger of attack, the greater the operation of self-defence,
of self-preservation. And the result is the amputation
by the stress of fear of all the higher forms of conation,
and the reduction of the individual and of the race to a
state of evolutionary destitution in which they are left
shrivelled and withered down to the basis of the crudest
and basest forms of instinct. Fear, self-preservation,
self-defence, are negative instincts whose function is mere
escape and avoidance ; they can never accomplish, achieve,
create anything, they can never give rise to any develop-
ment, any evolution. It is not the hypertrophy of self-
preservation, but the consequent atrophy of developmental
forces, which constitutes the baseness of egoism.

We come here upon a distinction of the most momentous
import. We use, and must continue to use, the words
' base/ ' noble,' ' lower,' ' higher,' in reference to various
forms and manifestations of the conative impulses of

196 PSYCHE'S LAMP

life. That is to say, we assign values to the principles
of valuation themselves, evaluate them as determinants
of ' higher ' or ' lower ' orders of value. On what ground
do we do so ? What justification have we for stigmatizing
the pleasures of the swine and exalting those of the hero
or the thinker ? Are they not all equally manifestations
of life's conative impulse ?

On that question we must not allow ourselves to be
put off with vague justifications. It is upon it that the
validity of our evaluations must rest.

It is, I trust, clear that within the human organism
in its psychological aspect are included in a wide series
of evolutionary stratifications diverse forms of particular-
ized impulses which reach back through the whole regress
of human ancestry to the primordial reactions of the
first protists, and represent in the dispositions of the
human individual the entire psychological evolution that
has led up to it. Psychological evolution, that is, the
unfolding of the conative impulses of life, tentatively
feeling their way to more approximate realizations of
their tendencies, is exactly similar in the outline of its
course to organic evolution. Schematically mapped out,
that course assumes the form of a branching genealogical
tree. Some of the branches diverge from near the roots
into a line of limited success to which they remain com-
mitted ; many thousands of various lines branch off at
different levels, representing specialized forms of activity
which confine the conative forces within a determined
channel and exclude them from any other form of ex-
pression. One great branch, that of the articulates,
represents what seemed the great achievement of an
efficient method, the fixation by successive elaborations
and accumulations of its minutest details in rigid
hereditary structure of instinctive behaviour. The main
trunk is composed of the more indefinite, unstable, and
labile types which are constantly inveigled into side-lines
of specialization, while the remnant goes on unsettled,

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 197

open to new opportunities and routes towards a truer
expression, and finds in humanity a new outlet of
enormously diversified choice and variability. The results
of human evolution itself are not structurally fixed at
all, they are not inheritable, but precariously transmitted
by the social organism. So that the human individual,
left to himself, remains a mere brute, on the level of the
crudest animality out of which mankind has arisen.
For the human stage of evolution he is entirely dependent
on social heredity ; it may leave him in the palaeolithic
phase of human evolution or raise him to the level of
the highest attained development.

Now it is a fact that where, in the individual conscious-
ness, various forms belonging to different strata of psycho-
logical evolution exist side by side, their relation in the
evolutionary scale is immediately felt in consciousness.
The older, more primitive and rudimentary organic
impulses pertaining to ancient and simple stages of
psychological development, fixed mostly as physiological
needs or wild instincts, are directly known as lower.
Where in the same consciousness there exist more recent,
freer, more highly developed needs, desires, appetences,
these, whether prepotent or no, will infallibly be recognized
as of higher value than the lower.

That intuition is not some mystic and mysterious
sense. It is the natural and inevitable result of the
operation of the conative impulses of life. If we have
succeeded in conceiving that impulse as perpetually
tending towards expression in a determined direction,
it follows that the affective values expressed in conscious-
ness which are most advanced in the direction towards
which it is tending are more complete expressions of it
than those corresponding to its more rudimentary and
primitive expressions. The satisfaction of the impulse
of life in its later achievements in self-development
may not be more ' massive ' than that derived from
the more primitive forms of its needs the latter are

108 PSYCHE'S LAMP

more firmly established and perfected in function and
feeling but it is necessarily of higher quality. And that
quality, that value is directly recognized as higher where
it is felt at all.

There are natural values. So enormous a proportion
of our values are manifest and transparent forgeries,
traditional fabrications arising out of the power-relations
of the social order, that we have in general grown dis-
trustful of the validity of all values. That is the penalty
of our ancestral dishonesties, the Nemesis of human lies.
But those forged values could not have arisen at all had
there been no sterling currency ; there are originals to
those forgeries. The whole activity of life consists in
reaction to the affective values determined by its cona-
tive disposition ; and among those values themselves there
exist relations, a respective value of values, a hierarchical
order of evolutionary rank, which is intuitively known
albeit frequently confounded with, and obscured by,
traditional pseudo-values. ' Higher ' means the closer
approximation of the conative tendency that determines
all activities to its intrinsic goal.

The word ' conscience ' in its old acceptation, has,
together with all its aliases, ' moral sense/ ' innate
intuition,' ' categorical imperative,' dropped to all intents
and purposes out of our vocabularies. We no longer
believe in any innate, arbitrary and absolute foundation
and final dogmatic appeal of ethics. Morality, it has
become unmistakably clear, is a social product, frequently
a social convention, frequently a fabricated social lie.
When our ' conscience ' prompts adherence, deference to
that convention, the instinct, the ' still small voice,' is
no other than our ' fear of public opinion,' our lapping
up of current shibboleths and consecrated judgments.
It is not noble and divine, but essentially ignoble and
ovine. It pertains to the instinct cowardice. The
concept of ' conscience ' is now wholly discredited and
obsolete.

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 199

Nevertheless I do not fear to affirm that there exists
a real and momentous fact, which, if not strictly identical
with the ancient concept, is at any rate analogous. Not
certainly a ' moral sense,' an instinctive intuition of
ethics, but in a considerably wider sense an innate evalua-
tion of all values.

The relations which we term ethical arise out of the
peculiar condition of human development which, depending
entirely on that of the social aggregate, require as a
condition of that development the mutual adjustment of
the elements of that aggregate; and it is that essential
adjustment, which cannot be carried out here by organic
equilibrium, which is the all-important object of ethical
growth. But that ethical adjustment is but a part of
the process of development of the powers of life, and
exists only as a means towards it. Hence the ethical
aspect, as it is currently understood, namely, as concerned
with human relations, is but a limited, partial and sub-
sidiary aspect of the aims which represent the ever widening
goals towards which the forces of life tend and aspire.

Wherever various orders of values stand side by side
in consciousness, the higher by the side of the lower,
that relative order is recognized and directly known,
whether admittedly or no. And that sense of value,
however confused by traditional pseudo-values, is not
to be wholly accounted for by reference to those, for it
most potently and clearly asserts itself when operating
in utter defiance of convention and tradition, of ' public
opinion,' of established norms. It is most conspicuous
for then it is the most genuine and direct expression of
conation towards higher levels of realization when
isolated, obstructed, decried and defiant. By virtue
of that natural sense of value it is that we appeal to
our own approval as to the highest, most valid and
competent court.

The highest that is in us is recognized, known, as highest,
however faintly felt, to whatever order that ' highest ' may

200 PSYCHE'S LAMP

appertain. The Christian who is debarred by his educa-
tional misfortune from seeing beyond the thick veil of
traditional spiritual values, of traditional ' truth,' yet can-
not but strongly feel, and justly, the enormous superiority,
the transcendent worth, of those spiritual values above the
coarseness, crudity, bestiality, ' materialism/ of the world
about him, of the lower values he knows. Hence his
' conscience ' adds the full might of its judgment to the
already titanic force of established values with which
he has been endowed by his educational growth, to the
' cloud of witnesses/ and confirms them into an immovable
rock of faith. The force of natural values confirms that
of artificial ones, pronounces them to be immeasurably
the highest that he knows. All higher values, which he
only knows by hearsay, are confounded by him, and
assimilated with, that crudeness and ' materialism ' to
which his conscience infallibly declares him to be superior.

The highest that is felt is confidently known as highest.
Hence, as we have noted, satisfaction within the sphere
of the base can only arise from atrophic development, from
absence of the higher forms of conation. Our vulgarity
is not a development of baseness, but a deficiency of
higher development. Every form of degradation is the
conversion of means into an end in itself, a limitation ;
every means tends to become an end and to bar the way
to further outlook in the absence of evolutionary activity.
Physical force, money, food, talent, scholarship, self-
preservation, ' morality/ become ends in themselves, and
development is thereupon arrested.

The pervasive and multiform animal instinct which is
in some of its partial aspects described as ' self-regarding
sentiment ' is, I consider, much more fundamental ; it is
a feeling of evolutionary values. Protean in the multi-
plicity of its forms and manifestations, it is like all other
impulses, subject to aberrations and degradations, and
to developmental sublimations. The strutting of all males
before females, their display of themselves, their out-

THE PRIMARY CONATIVE TENDENCY 201

spreading of feathers and colours, their songs and gurgles,
and comical love-dances and parades, are, on the face
of them, immediately related to the reproductive race-
function, that is, to the most obviously extra-individualistic
impersonal impulse. They are in that aspect the very
reverse of self-regarding. Yet they are at the same time
the type of self-regard, of vanity, of exaltation of self,
self-admiration and desire for admiration. What is here
admired, what is held up as an object of complacency
and admiration for others, for the females especially as
instruments of propagation and perpetuation, is not
' self ' at all, the ' ego,' the ' subject ' of metaphysics.
Does anyone mean to tell me that a stickleback or a turkey
has any concern for his metaphysical ' ego ' ? The object of
admiration, of vanity, is the achievement of the life-impulse,
the perfection with which it has realized itself, attained
to expression in the individual. The individual displays
his strength, his agility, his talents, his accomplishments,
his beauty ; he does not display his weakness, his foibles,
his cowardice, his ugliness ; he hides those. He does not
display his self, he displays as admirable what he regards
as most exalted in his composition, carefully putting
out of sight and forgetting those ingredients which have
base values. His struttings are an aesthetic judgment of
values, a declaration of faith in what he considers to be
admirable. And all our aesthetics, our poetic, musical,
pictorial arts, are, as is commonly recognized, derivative
transformations of male love-struttings and displays.
(Compare the general inaptitude of women for creative
art. The creatively artistic woman is an abnormality,
subject to ovarian abnormalities. Sappho, the archetype
of the woman artist, suffered from perverted sexuality.
On the other hand, woman is the great appreciator and
enjoyer of art, if not a judge and a critic of it.)

Vanity, conceit, pride, the wooing of public admiration,
are exaltations not of self, but of those aspects of self
which individuals at various stages of evolution regard

202 PSYCHE'S LAMP

as the most admirable in themselves, the highest. They
display for public admiration those qualities to which
their outlook, whether limited or developed, ascribes the
highest values. Those qualities may be precisely those
which they themselves possess in the smallest degree,
which they not so much possess as would like to possess ;
they boast of that which they have not. The coward
makes a display of courage, the ugly man of beauty,
the weak of power. ' Hypocrisy is an homage which vice
pays to virtue.'

All ' sentiment of self/ self-admiration, ostentation,
implies a scale of valuations, a differentiation of the
qualities and aspects which are held up to the admiration
of self and others. ' Those values,' it may be objected,
' are social products we pride ourselves on what others
admire, envy in us ; the female selects the male ; ostenta-
tion courts public opinion.' Is not that a vicious circle ?
What determines the selection of the female, of public
opinion, of others ? The approval of others is courted
when that is regarded as the highest judgment ; it is
courted by the mediocre individual who is evolutionally
not even up to the average level ; that is why most vanity
and ostentation are base and vulgar. The higher indivi-
dual, he who has developed, carried in himself the evolu-
tionary development higher, does not court public opinion,
but, on the contrary, defies it, scorns it, offends it. He
opposes to it his valuations, and abides securely by that
judgment. He seeks, on the contrary, to impose his
valuations on public opinion, to impose ' his personality.'
' His personality ? ' It is, of course, no more his personality
than that which the vulgar ostentator seeks to display,
it is his highest values, the highest point of evolution
reached by aspiring life within himself. He no more
desires to display or impose his weaknesses, his lower
values, than does the turkey.

CHAPTER IX

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT

THE ' human faculty,' suggestive in its portentous powers
of a miraculous origin, rests upon a very definite
fact the symbolism of the word. Language is not,
as was at one time supposed, the device invented
by a transcendent intellect to achieve self-utterance ;
it is the source whence that intellect itself has sprung
into being. Word-symbolism created the human faculty.
When once, out of cries, calls, and signals, the trick of
naming was caught up, no limit could stay the course
of abstraction, the coining of things, the acts and qualities
of things, the qualities of those qualities, into words
permanently fixed concepts. From the naming of the
trivial objects of its daily needs the human mind went
on to ' universals ' and lists of the ' categories.' There
was nothing to arrest its career of predication and compari-
son, of analysis and synthesis. The system of symbols,
accumulated and refined in acuteness by the interaction
of human minds, became not only a system of signals
between them, the means of communication, of education,
of psychological transmission ; it also became the means
of thought, the organ of human psychosis. Man's soul
became symbolic. The word became man.

We think in words. Thought, the peculiar medium
of human psychism, constitutes the great bulk of our
focal consciousness, of what we term ' our mind.' That
consciousness is to an overwhelming degree cognitive ;
hence the identification by introspective psychology of

203

204 PSYCHE'S LAMP

mind, of soul, with thought the res cogitans ; the
intellectual, cognitive, epistemological conception of
mind.

But cognition, we have more than once noted, does
much more than afford the means of effectively serving
the conative impulses of the organism ; it reacts upon
those impulses themselves and transforms them. Under
its action the primordial, undetermined psychic forces,
conations, affections, take on new shapes, tend to new
objectives, assume new values, are directed to new fields
of action, to new horizons of desire. Only thus can those
forces come into purposive operation ; their development
is thus determined by that of cognition.

Hence not only has the word, by its analytic algebra,
created a new cognitive organ, the intellect, and brought
forth the marvels of its power ; it has no less amazingly
called new purposes and new emotions into being ; it
has opened a new world of aims and values. The animal
whom the word had quickened began to shake and startle
the world with the strange sounds of laughter and of
tears. His purposes and values, his looking before and
after, flew in their oscillations beyond the organic orbit
of his daily needs until, by an appalling aberration, they
swung beyond life itself, into eternity. Human desires,
the things we live by, the things we live and die for, are
no less than thought itself the offspring of the word.
Armed with his symbolism, the thinking animal has become
a moral animal, a religious animal, an artistic animal.
Not the cognitive instrument alone is the product of the
word. The word has created the very soul ctf man.

But there is another side to the picture. Against the
prodigies of thought are to be set no less colossal miseries
and handicaps ; against its triumphs its disasters. That
symbolism has been the source of all human marvels
but it is a symbolism. Its whole structure, and conse-
quently that of the thought and the mentality that is the
outcome of it, is artificial, factitious. In proportion to

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT 205

its very perfection, to its power of abstract symbolization,
it of necessity drifts more and more out of touch with that
which it symbolizes, acquires a weird, unnatural self-
existence apart from it. The word-fashioned concept,
the Platonic ' Idea,' becomes a sort of entity endowed
with an unnatural phantasmal life. In the dumb animal
life and its cognitive exploration are miserably limited.
But by that very limitation they are anchored to
reality. The higher animals are capable of thought, and
their thought is, like ours, symbolic ; but the symbols
with them are the actual sensory signs of cognition. The
purposes and values that grow out of that cognition spring
directly from primordial conations. With word-symbolism
man has become the master of a wonder-working machine ;
but, as with every machine, its master has also become
its slave. He has become overwhelmed by his own power.
Thought is limed in the glue of words, and strives
in vain to rise. It is compelled more and more to dwell
in that symbolic world upon which it depends. Leaving
the depths, the realities of psychic life behind, it is drawn
to the iridescent film that plays upon the surface ; it
comes to be a stranger to reality and shrinks when con-
fronted with it as before something exotic and strange,
as if it had seen a ghost The word-symbol tends to
displace, to be mistaken for, and handled Li lieu
of, the idea, the experience for which it ostensibly
stands. The magic power of creating substantive con-
cepts, multiplied by the word, betrays by its fatal
facility. Words can be struck without check from
the multiplying-press, like treasury notes, and are no
longer under the necessity of representing bullion in
the bank of reality. They may even be forged, fabricated ;
a false currency may be thrown into circulation, which
even experts may find it difficult to distinguish from the
legitimate tender of thought. How many of the ideas,
of the thoughts within you, cling to the values which they
professedly connote ? How many are demonstrable fabri-

206 PSYCHE'S LAMP

cations, the history of which, where and when they were
coined, is even historically traceable ?

Out of that artificial life of word-thought, conceptual
thought, out of that ' realism ' in the scholastic sense
strange antinomies have come about. By virtue of that
power, man, the discoverer of truth, has become also
the inventor of lies. Homo sapiens, the rational animal,
is of all animals the only one that possesses the faculty
of being inordinately, fantastically, deliriously irrational.
He is so habitually, systematically, of set purpose. The
dumb world, were it not itself unrational, would behold
him with amazement commercing with phantasms, seeing
things, gravely gibbering to himself, cogitating phantas-
magorias, haranguing the void, orating to the east-wind,
struck with unaccountable lunacies, stung to homicidal
manias by hidden ecstasies, and so ardently dealing with
his chimeras as to be entirely insensible to the realities
about him. Did ever any sensible dumb animal woo life
with such mummeries ? His thought weighs the stars,
and he lives enchanted in a world of hallucinations. He
is the master of thought and the fool of the universe.

The faculty of man has not only become the supreme
instrument of adaptation, of evolutionary development,
but also the means of inadaptation, of degradation, of
degeneration. Man is the moral animal ; he is the creator
of the ideals, he is the saint, the martyr, the hero. Yet
he is also the basest of all animals He lays down his
life for an ideal, and he cheats a child.

The dependence of the human mind upon word-sym-
bolism carries with it the most extraordinary biological
consequence. That psychical apparatus is physiologically
intransmissible. For its handing down from one generation
to another none of the physiological devices elaborated
by organic evolution are available ; for through organic
continuity no cognition can be transmitted. The trans-
mission of human cognition can only take place by the
operation of the social aggregate. It is the latter which

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT 207

supplies to every individual mind its word-consciousness.
The soul of man, in so far as it is human at all, is a social
product. His actuating impulses, the palimpsest of his
instincts, his organism and sense-organs, derive from the
multifarious parentage of his organic ancestry. His
' humanity ' is entirely derived from the collective social
environment, not by way of descent, but directly from
the actual phase of social growth into which he is born.
That human consciousness enters his being mainly by
means of words, which carry with them all the developments,
and all the diseases, anomalies, and falsifications of human
word-thought. That word-consciousness post-natally im-
planted into each individual is superposed on all the
products of pre-human psychological evolution, and
becomes his focal consciousness, his thinking soul.

It is a strange situation. ' Humanity,' the social
environment, the ' Spirit of the times ' the Hegelian
Zeitgeist are mere abstractions. We are in the habit
of discounting the expressions as somewhat loose meta-
phors, personifications of concepts which have only a
theoretical existence. They connote merely the aggregate,
the resultant, the sum-total of constituent human units.
There are no such things, you will be told; there are only
men. And yet, as a fact, no individual human conscious-
ness exists at all except as the product of that
aggregate, of that 'abstraction.' The whole of human
consciousness, not its word-language alone, but all the
consequences of it, its concepts, its values, its senti-
ments, ideas and ideals, are imparted to each individual,
who but for that artificial animation would be but a
dumb ape, by that aggregate, that ' abstraction ' which is
itself made up of traditionally, socially manufactured
souls.

It is by that transmission that the individual can
become the 'heir of all the ages,' and that human evolution
is possible. But here also those great advantages are
set off by no less colossal disadvantages. Not only are

208 PSYCHE'S LAMP

the achievements of the race transmissible to the individual,
but so also are the diseases which in the social organism
word-thought has accumulated. The basis of fact for
the current prejudice against the intermarriage of kindred
is that family taints and morbid tendencies are thereby
summated and intensified. Precisely the same thing takes
place in the social transmission of the human mind. Every
accident and disease of thought is accumulated in that
heredity no less, far more surely indeed, than are its
conquests and achievements. That socially transmitted
mind-stuff does not at all represent the actual experience
and cognition of the race, the accumulated achievement
of its effort to know its psychic development, its supreme
conquests. What is transmitted to, and bestowed upon,
the individual is something entirely different. It is not
the psychological product of the intrinsic powers and
constitution of the human mind, but that of the constitution
of the social organism that transmits it.

The social organism so we must call it, since it exercises
the most important function of an organism, that of
procreation is yet no physiologically adjusted organism ;
no automatic equilibrium has taken place within it. It
is one of the fictions of all our ' history,' which has
become embodied in our terminology and language e.g.,
in the very words ' society/ ' social/ ' constitution ' that
the human race has become ' organized/ has 'organized '
itself ; implying a purposive, deliberate, collective effort
to contrive, dispose, and settle human relations in
a practical manner, with a view to the best attainable
result and efficiency, under the guidance of a will to truth.
Nothing of the sort has ever taken place. Mankind has
not organized itself or become organized. The ' social
organism ' has been constituted by the self-establishment
of dominating and predatory individual powers, which have
subjugated the bulk of the race. That is the only sort
of ' organization ' that has ever taken place in the ' social
organism ' tyranny tempered by revolt. Consequently

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT 209

the mental inheritance transmitted to the individual is
that transmitted by those established powers, and is not
the psychological product of the ' human faculty ' or
' human nature,' but of those transmitting powers. It is
not the product of cognitive impulses at all ; and cannot
be psychologically regarded as representing cognition or
experience. The impulses and interests under the urge
of which it has been produced have not been those which
throughout the development of life bring about cognition
as a utilitarian function, but altogether different impulses
and interests, those, namely, that have for their object
the maintenance of power and domination, instincts of
self-preservation. They have not been produced by will
to truth, but by will to falsehood.

Hence the socially transmitted material of human
consciousness is a profoundly falsified material consisting
of pseudo-concepts, pseudo-distinctions, pseudo-values
Every human mind born into the world receives that
falsified mentality from the social environment, is educated
by it, and provided with falsified metaphysics, falsified
psychology, falsified history, falsified ethics. By a subtle
and crowning falsification the process by which the human
mind is thus deformed is successfully concealed and
disguised by laying the blame for the resulting anarchy
and confusion on the human mind itself, on * human
nature,' on 'the fallibility of human reason.' The intrinsic
constitution of man is made the scapegoat for the psycho-
logical effects of the constitution of the social organism.
That is, of course, an utter misrepresentation. Those
deformities, those imbecilities, those absurdities and
perversities, are not the product of * human nature ' at
all, but of the predatory social organism that transmits
them. They are handed down from generation to genera-
tion in the human mind, by its social heredity, not by its
psychic or physiological heredity.

A new psychological fixation, similar in its result, though
different in its operation, from that produced by instinct

14

210 PSYCHE'S LAMP

in insects, is brought about by the social transmission of
' custom/ ' tradition,' ' authority,' and their falsification
in the interests of power. And the same contest is renewed
between the arresting, stabilizing forces of feeling here
represented by the ' values ' of power interests and the
labile and developmental forces of cognition, between the
fixed and transmitted values of artificial aesthetic reaction,
and the values of the individual freedom of noetic reaction
' judging for itself.' Human evolution has taken place
by the operation of the latter in spite of the gigantic
handicap. But in bringing about that evolution those
cognitive powers, universally decried and denounced as
being opposed to ' right feeling ' and congenitally imbecile,
have operated in a curiously indirect manner. They have
never operated directly, with purposive evolutionary ends
in view, constructively, but by criticism, destructively ;
by sapping and invalidating those falsifications upon
which dominating powers are founded. Here as elsewhere
the forces of development have proceeded unconsciously,
the purposes of Life have been carried out ' blindly ' ;
even though its instrument has been the most highly
developed form of conscious power and purpose, of
directed thought.

The most striking manifestation of that process is
presented by that aspect of human development which is
known as the moral aspect. It is, as we have seen, the
process of adaptation of the individual to the social
organism, and as such is one of the chief tasks with
which the forces of life are concerned in human develop-
ment. That ethical aspect has occupied an enormous
place in human thought, which is replete with moral
values, and ethical ideas, which has constructed ethical
systems, and been fired with ethical enthusiasms. But all
that ethical thought has been virtually of no account as
a factor in the actual process of ethical development. And,
strangest fact of all, what measure of influence it has
exercised over the development has been directed against

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT 211

it. Ethical evolution has taken place apart from ethical
thought, by opposition to domination, by the gradual
destruction of the falsifications of power-thought, by critical
thought undirected to any ethical ends. It has taken
place, not through the advocates of 'goodness,' but through
the advocates of ' wickedness ' ; not through the saint,
but through the rebel.

The human mind, which in all its peculiarly human
elements is a social product, is thus superposed upon
the vital foundation of natural impulses and values, as
an artificial superstructure raised tier upon tier by the
symbolism of language, by the social transmission and
transformation of all concepts and values above the
realities of existence. The human focal consciousness,
the most sharply defined form of consciousness, is thus
at the same time that from which the motive forces
of life are most darkly hidden, in which they are most
unconscious. Hence that profound impression of * arti-
ficiality,' of unreality, which life makes upon us.

Our whole daily procedure is ruled by super-physio-
logical, by superorganic instincts more blindly fixed
in dead mechanism than the structural psychological
stereotype of the insect. We rise at the call of a customary
time-table, dress and breakfast at the behest of the clock,
the cog-wheels of which have become our masters and
the regulators of our organic appetites. We attend to
our avocations, the common round, the daily task. Our
work is performed according to the set rules of the game ;
our intercourse with our fellows, formal or intimate,
follows specified customary formulas and conventions.
We make love according to book. Our pleasures and
recreations are no less than our ' duties ' confined within
the frame of current prescriptions. Our life-work, be it
the most mechanical drudgery or the most skilled brain-
labour, is the observance of set rules. In our most creative
work itself ' public opinion,' the critics, the conventional
formulas, are ever at our elbow ; could we wholly forget

212 PSYCHE'S LAMP

and disregard them, we should become unintelligible. At
the climacterics and cross-roads of our lives we decide
our fate with the same narcotic conformity as we choose
the colour of our neck-gear. Do we not, when perplexed,
even seek advice so as to ensure ourselves against any
danger of originality ?

On how many occasions have the psychical forces within
us, the daring appetites, the infinite possibilities of the
life-force, the honesties of thought, the royal ideo-motor
powers of control, been thoroughly aroused and on their
mettle ? How often have we been really wide awake ?
we, the fundamental forces and powers in our being ?
How often have they been called upon to act, to manifest
themselves, moved to decide in accordance with what we
know, what we actually believe ? How often has our soul
been creative ?

The nature of ' genius ' is debated in unlearned societies
with considerable drollery. In the midst of a world
fettered in the toils of transmitted thought, custom,
tradition, and orthodox values, there appears a man that
spontaneously thinks and acts, that is in mind and action
creative. He is gaped at with hostile indignation mostly,
and, mayhap, hoisted after his death upon an altar and
canonically pronounced to belong to the species ' genius.'
His valet, however, that is, your valet-minded friend,
will tell you that he knew Mr. Hero-Genius quite well,
and that he was a person much like any other, who really
ate and smoked like you and I ; a person, if the truth
be told, somewhat disappointing, of poor and at times
incoherent conversation, decidedly rude and mannerless,
and in much of life's commerce singularly helpless ; a
person with vices too ; on the whole a much overrated
person.

Nothing is more rejoicing than our current gibberings,
and even our profoundest pronouncements, concerning
genius. Ask what a man of genius is, and you will be
told that he is a superior kind of man, a great man, a

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT 213

sort of superman, as it were. Or more humorously still
you will be informed in tones of subtle penetration that
' genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.' Sir
Francis Galton even more strangely bestows upon the
world a treatise, accounted a classic, imparting the sur-
prising information that genius is ' hereditary/ and dis-
closing the fact that the Pitts and the Scaligers were
geniuses ; and that, in short, Sir Francis has not the
remotest notion of the meaning of the word ' genius '
beyond what he has gathered from Johnson's Dictionary.

Talent, ability, capacity for taking pains, belong to
a psychological rubric only remotely and incidentally
connected with the rubric Genius. In order to have
genius you must have originality. Originality that is,
not the mere freakishness of intentionally whimsicality,
but the breaking away of your soul from the bonds of
custom-thought and falsified power-thought, and the
achievement of its freedom. The play of human power
in liberty from that bondage is what in art, in science,
in literature, in politics, in practical engineering, in thought,
in conduct, constitutes the quality of genius. If to that
quality you have also superadded talent, ability, then
you have the realization of genius.

There are of necessity under the life of standardized
thought and behaviour, dark, simmering depths. Beneath
the routine of a well-behaved, conforming life a score
of ' we's,' as unlike that * faultlessly ' dressed diner and
his table manners as a corroboreeing black-fellow, lie
draped, suppressed, and partly asphyxiated. We flick the
ash of our cigarette and keep up the conversation over
our coffee, apparently respectable enough and safe
personages. But under that unexceptional attitude and
manner there stirs somewhere a roaring wild beast, a
howling naked savage, an Eliogabalus ; and likewise too,
maybe, a hero, a martyr, an unbrowbeaten thinker, a
perished artist, as shy of issuing out of their darkness,
their conventional cell, as the brute and the troglodyte.

214 PSYCHE'S LAMP

Yet they are there, primal appetites, immense aspirations
and all, really and actually alive in us.

What in that orderly life of routine becomes of them,
the unacknowledged, unknown doubles that shadow the
well-behaved, law-abiding, opinion-abiding citizen ?

They may on occasion burst forth with terrible, astonish-
ing effect ; the platitudinarian gentleman may actually
be revealed to us transformed into a raving, wallowing,
brute-beast. Or he may become transfigured into a
sublime hero. That happens on occasions on the whole
exceptional. On occasions not exceptional they never-
theless do express themselves, find some vent of expression
for themselves in some manner or other.

They express themselves in the first place by pro-
nouncing the routine of life a terrible boredom, by making
us feel their unutterable tedium. They will at times
drive us to go to sea, to the South Pole, to Western Uganda,
to Northern Thibet, * in search of adventure.' If war
breaks out we pronounce it an appalling calamity, and
assume our most solemn countenance, but the savage and
the hero within us are up and rejoicing ; they have their
opportunity, they will obtain their freedom. Our bored,
enchained savages crave for ' excitement. ' Our fascinating
Lady Frippery is everything that she should be ; but she
must at all cost have excitement. That is what the bored,
virtuous savage calls for from the depths.

It is in those activities that are farthest removed and
most immune from the influence of the social strife and
its falsifications, in non-utilitarian, useless activities, in
our amusements, pleasures, tastes, fictions and day-
dreams, that the psychic realities within us come to light
and expression. The essential information concerning
people in Who's Who is to be found under the rubric
Recreations. The superior importance of those activities
is proclaimed by the vulgar evaluation of our commercial-
ism in the very disparagement which it casts upon them ;
for, being ' useless,' they are ends in themselves, possess

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A SOCIAL PRODUCT 215

an intrinsic worth for their own sakes, and are not, like
the activities imposed by the panic of necessity, mere
means to other ends. Artistic values, then, are the sig-
nificant expressional and revelatory values. For in its
essential significance, art is not what you go out to inspect
in galleries and exhibitions ; it is not what supplies the
theme of art-talk. That is but a narrow aspect of the
thing which, psychologically, is as wide as life, which is
part of every act and gesture. Your affective self, your
inmost self, expresses itself in every act ; the very bodily
features of a man, his facies, corporeal twitchings, and
methods of ambulation, are stamped no less sharply than
his motives and ideals, and for the same reason, with the
values * high,' ' low,' ' noble,' ' ignoble,' and assign to
him his place in the scale of evolution, of evaluation.
In all he does his self is to a greater or less extent indelibly
prefigured ; but most clearly in what he does ' for its
own sake,' under no dictation but that of his impulses
and instincts, likes and dislikes. That is why art is
psychologically so important ; why carved stones and
painted potsherds are humanly significant and interesting.
Art, as the creative expression of those deeper values
which no mere discursive, ratiocinative language, un-
touched with emotion, can convey, is not essentially
noble or beautiful. Its merit, as art, is conditioned by
the skill of mastery over the means of expression, and by
the truth, that is, the sincerity and spontaneity, of that
expression. Qualities which are of necessity conflicting ;
for conscious skill inevitably checks spontaneity : hence
the charm of the unskilled 'primitive,' in whom technique
has not killed the superior worth of spontaneity of ex-
pression. But, however faithful or skilful the expression,
the ultimate worth must needs lie in the mentality that
is expressed. Art, in every sense, is the expression of
man's place in the scale of life, of life's development,
of his nobility or of his baseness. It is the expression
of human sottishness no less than of human divinity.

216 PSYCHE'S LAMP

The horrors of our coloured-cover literature, of our
pornographic music, of our genteel architecture, fall under
the rubric Art. They are the art of our mentality,
expressive, representative of it. Art can be that, or it
can be Parthenons and Symphonies Pathetiques, according
to the soul of which it is the expression.

Hence the abiding medicinable redeeming virtue of all
great art, of the expression of the soul of the past in periods
of less disturbed health, of more settled world-outlook.
Yet no expression of the past can serve truly for that
of the present. The affective values and realities of life
depend upon its cognitive outlook and must needs change
with it. No art, no emotional expression, however great,
whose cognitive values are no longer true, can nurture us
truly, however much they may heal and cleanse us. To
take up our abode there, is to fall out from the march of
life, to withdraw from our age and its evolution, to
become reactionaries. To us who stand as ' on a peak
in Darien' before new horizons, no great art is possible,
because we live amid values that are ' no more ' and values
that are ' not yet.' In the convulsion of a world over-
taken at last and overwhelmed by the Nemesis of the
accumulated falsifications and mendacities of its heritage
the true expression of our souls' realities, in the battle-
glow of the hour, cannot be other than one of strife, of
revolt. And strife, however noble its aim or beneficent
its fruits, is always in itself ignoble, debasing. Strife calls
for the defensive attitude, the operation of the instincts
of self-preservation ; and those instincts, subsidiary and
instrumental merely, as a necessary evil, to their opposites,
to the extra-individual impersonal impulses, are the source
of all vicious, base, ungenerous tendencies in life. The
baseness, the sterility, of the present times, are the outcome
of the hypertrophied self-defensive, self-preserving impulses,
of the fear, the caution, the suspicion, the egoism which
strife, conflict, engender. Our ' materialism,' our vulgarity,
our incapacity for great art, are the effect of that.

CHAPTER X

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY

i

THE whole edifice of human conceptions has been built,
ultimately, upon a single concept that of individuality.
The philosopher, who in his analysis takes down the
edifice stone by stone, comes at last upon the foundation-
stone, proclaims his discovery ' Cogito, ergo sum ' as the
bedrock of all certainty, and proceeds to rebuild upon
the self -same foundation. Religion likewise rests upon
the concept of the individual ' soul ' ; and the task of
academic psychology is to protect it and its various
aliases the ' Ego,' the ' experient,' ' the subject of
psychology,' ' the transcendental unity of apperception,'
against corrosive analysis. Human life, emotional,
social, political life, proceed upon the same fundamental
postulate, and are concerned with the ' individual,' with
' individuals,' and with nothing else. The forces of Life
and the realities of the Universe proceed on their courses
utterly incognizant of ' the individual ' and without any
consideration whatever for our fundamental concept ; to
our profound distress and pained perplexity.

There are gross, obvious grounds for the conception.
You perceive yourself by reflection as a coherent thing
persisting amid various settings, delimitated from an
external world by a surface of skin. The domain of
your feelings extends to that surface ; your fingers and
your toes feel, your umbrella and your shoes do not.
Outside the frontier of your skin lies an external universe
which is not-you. A metaphysician comes along and

217

218 PSYCHE'S LAMP

sorely perplexes you by pointing out that your skin-
bound body and that external universe are, for ought you
can show to the contrary, but parts of your own mind,
that all you know of them are feelings and sensations
of your mind, and nothing more. That staggering demon-
stration, against which you are powerless to urge anything
relevant, makes not the slightest difference. Let the
solipsist have his way, let Sirius and Altai'r, the meta-
physician and your umbrella, let your sensient skin-bag
be ideas in that world of your mind. That world ' of
your mind ' is still exactly the same world divided into
two by the surface of your skin.

You are not only coherent in space, you are also con-
tinuous in time. That coherent system which is reading
this page is, so far as respects continuity in time, the
same system as the child who once laboriously spelled
c-a-t, cat.

Like every coherent system, you have your own peculiar
characteristics. No two pebbles on the beach are exactly
alike, and you differ in several ways from everybody else.
But that does not constitute your ' Ego ' any more than
the coherence, continuity, and discreet peculiarities of
the pebble constitute a pebble-ego.

If the views which have been expressed in the foregoing
pages are correct, substantial support may be offered to
the Ego-conception from the consideration that the whole
diversity of feelings, thoughts, and actions are manifes-
tations of a common original conative disposition which
is the source of them all, and is the same throughout
the sentient organism. But that is equally true of the
pebble. The disposition of energy in the pebble causes
it to react in a determinate way to determinate conditions.
In the pebble those reactions are fixed and unmodifiable,
whereas in the living organism the disposition which is
manifested in its reactions is modified by every one of
those reactions, so that it is always changing. If you
call your conative disposition your Ego, that is then a

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 219

much less permanent and stable thing than the pebble
individuality.

'But,' says the traditional psychologist, 'since you think,
since you feel, since you do things, there must be a thinker,
a feeler, a doer.' That is the grand argument of traditional
psychology. Here we have the ' subject ' of psychology.
Before considering it let us, if you please, first consider
the pebble as a doer.

Exactly the same thought -puzzle arises in connection
with our pebble.

All the reactions, the ' properties ' of the pebble have
been resolved by the investigations of physical science
into ' modes of motion.' Until quite lately one 'property '
remained which was not resolvable into motion, and which
accordingly served as a measure of the quantity of matter.
" Metaphysicians," said Clerk-Maxwell, '* have failed to
perceive that the sole unalterable property of matter is
mass. Even to this day those who are not familiar with
the free motion of large masses, though they admit the
truth of dynamical principles, yet feel no repugnance in
accepting the theory known as Boscovitch's that sub-
stances are composed of systems of points which are
mere centres of forces. ... It is probable that many
qualities of bodies might be explained on this supposition,
but no arrangement of centres of force, however com-
plicated, could account for the fact that a body has a
certain measurable mass. No part of the mass can be
due to the existence of the supposed centre of force."
There is some piquancy in the circumstance that the
answer to Clerk-Maxwell came not from any misguided
metaphysician, but from Clerk-Maxwell's own successor
at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where the
above words were written. He dispelled that last residual
* property ' of matter and showed it to be an exponential
function of motion. Motion of what ? Here we are
brought back by our pebble to precisely the same situation
as that which gave rise to our ' subject of psychology.'

220 PSYCHE'S LAMP

If there is motion, there must be something that moves ;
to speak of motion without something moving is not
grammatical. That, of course, is so as a matter of
grammar. Our concept of motion embodied in our
grammar refers to the motion of coherent systems ; but
when we have resolved the whole of those coherent systems
into their elements the concept of motion fails us : we
are left with a verb without a subject.

In demanding a subject for our verb we are asking for the
'cause' of the motion. When we have got down to motion
without anything being left to move, we have got beyond
motion in the form of our experience to the ' cause ' of
motion. And the ' cause ' here, as we have seen, is not
at all the 'agent,' but that of which the sense presentation
is the sign. In our motion without anything moving
what we need is not a subject for our verb, but a thing of
which motion is significant. That thing is what physicists
call energy, a thing which, as we cannot conceive it or
describe it by its causes, we are compelled to describe
by its effects as that of which motion is significant.
' Motion ' is for us the motion of coherent systems, of
things formed, upon which we can act by altering that
form. If that were anything more than a symbolic,
schematic representation of our possible action, our
grammatical logic would hold good to the end ; but when
we have analysed down the system, and completely
resolved its configuration, what is left is no longer
* something that we can act upon,' something the form
of which we can alter since there is no form left to be
altered ; our symbolic concept of 'matter and motion,'
and our grammatical logic are no longer applicable. We
have passed out of the sphere of possible action, and the
' motion without anything moving ' is no longer our
symbolic representation of ' matter and motion,' but that
for which the symbol stands, the ' cause of motion.'

The ' doer,' the ' thinker,' stand in exactly the same
predicament as the ' moving thing.' They are applicable

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 221

concepts so long as we deal with the complex, coherent
system as we have it. But resolve those systems into
their components, and they both vanish. Just as the
concept * motion ' is only applicable to a formed coherent
system which we can act upon, so the concepts ' thinker,'
' doer/ are only applicable to the formed and coherent
systems which we call 'we.' The thinker of the thoughts
is that coherent whole just as the object of the ' properties '
of the stone is the stone. Analyse the stone down, the
object vanishes ; analyse the thinker down, the subject
vanishes. There is a relation of subject and object in each
of our cognitive acts sensations, concepts, thoughts ; but
those cognitive acts are only possible to an elaborately
formed system or disposition, and the subject is not
otherwise discoverable than as that coherent and con-
tinuous aggregate of which our sensations, concepts,
thoughts, are manifestations. As soon as you analyse
it, as you take the configuration to pieces, there is no
subject left.

So that for the grounds of our conception of the subject
we are thrown back, after all, on those manifest and
unsophisticated facts of coherence and continuity from
which we started. Psycho-metaphysical analysis of the
' cogito ' adds nothing to those manifest facts ; and if
we would study further the nature of the cogitant, it is
by turning our attention to the nature of that coherence
and continuity that we must do so, and not by postulating
grammatical subjects for our verbs. Here again the most
satisfactory knowledge available to us is knowledge of
origins ; ' scire ' is not ' per causas scire,' but ' per
engines scire.'

That coherent organism which we call our ' self ' is not
something which at a given time became created out of
nothing and entered the universe. It has developed from
a cell, the product of the fusion of two germ-cells, that is,
cells functionally unspecialized and undifferentiated, in
which the conative dispositions of two other organisms

222 PSYCHE'S LAMP

were present. They accordingly reproduced the reactions
of the parent organisms, beginning from the stage when
those organisms were also functionally undifferentiated
cells, and passing through all the steps of their differ-
entiation in mutual relation to each other, to the building
up of a differentiated aggregate of complex configuration,
its development, growth, ageing, decay and death. In
the course of that process the individual life the common
conative dispositions of the new organism become modified,
and those modifications of all its constituent cells are
necessarily transmitted to another generation. That pro-
cess is continuous, and has been repeated from the first
beginnings of life. The individual life is only one step,
one link, one phase, in the process. There is no break
in it. There is as much continuity between the phases
which we call generations of individual lives as between
those which we call childhood, maturity, old age. The
* thing/ the continuous and coherent system, is not the
individual, but the entire chain of life. Life develops,
the individual develops ; the one development is part of
the other. The abstraction of the particular phase,
' individual,' out of the continuous series is as purely
arbitrary, a mere convenient abstraction, as if we were
to choose a period of a day, or of a century, or of a thousand
years, as our unit. The ' individual ' is an artificial unit.
The circumstance that there is a break in cognitive
consciousness between one generation and another, that
your ' memory ' does not reach beyond the cycle of your
individual life it does not even cover the whole of
that and that cognition is not transmitted, is a very
superficial and irrelevant consideration. A great deal
besides is cognitively unrepresented in our consciousness ;
the very forces that determine the operation of that
consciousness are not cognitively represented in it.

Those are, like our organism, the product of the
whole chain of life. In precisely the same way as
your reactions, your feelings, are related to one another,

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 223

thus giving rise to your ' unity of apperception/ making
your experience into a coherent whole, an ' individual '
experience, so are they also related to, and bound up
with, the reactions, the feelings, of primordial protozoa,
of organisms, in which life has developed those reactive
tendencies, those feelings, those appetites, those sentiments,
those modes of cognition which operate in you, and con-
stitute your active psychism. Your mental attitude at
this moment is as intimately related to the reactions of
life in some primordial marine creature as they are to
the impressions of your childhood and of your youth.
The only line of demarcation between you and the
continuity of Life is that of your cognitive experience.
And to make that an essential and fundamental
demarcation is a purely cognitive, intellectualistic inter-
pretation.

You live in a cognitive world of word-symbols, you
think that is the foundation of your ergo sum \ But
that thought-world, which illusively appears to con-
stitute your psychic life is but its thin superficial vesture.
Its folds are moulded by a throbbing form of appetences,
of yearnings, which the world's contacts thrill into feelings.
Your thought-world is but an appanage of that pulsing
reality, the waves of which reach back to the distant
horizons of a strange past and move towards unknown
futures far beyond the phase of your ' individual ' life.

That thought-world do you believe that to be ' you ' ?
Has it not been manufactured for you in human workshops
as have your clothes and the furniture of your house ?
How much of that ' you ' would exist, I ask again, had
you been marooned in a desert island and providentially
enabled to live there at all ? Your concepts, your thoughts,
your views and opinions, and firm beliefs, how each
experience and event of life ' strikes you ' to trace those
is not a matter of metaphysical, or even of biological,
investigation, but merely of human history. Your con-
cepts are arranged alphabetically in any dictionary.

224 PSYCHE'S LAMP

The mountain-mass of prejudices by means of which
you judge, praise, condemn, and wax enthusiastic or
indignant, have been handed to you by all sorts of queer-
looking persons wearing antiquated clothes and also by
the Fleet Street paper which you read this morning at
breakfast.

But you actually dare to ' think for yourself,' you
have actually uprooted some of those prejudices from
your mind, torn the stones from the walls of your prison ;
you have asserted your ' individuality/ Brave deed ! After
those stones had been thoroughly loosened for you by
the imperceptible efforts of whole armies of thinkers ;
after every grain of cement had been slowly corroded
from around them, and the crowbars of generations had
tugged at them, you have actually managed to lift the
stone out and cast it from you, and you proudly exclaim,
' Behold what / have done ! ' Your cogitative, cognitive
life is, like all the other ingredients of your life, part of a
process, which extends far, very far, beyond you, of which
your thoughts supposing you to be the deepest and
acutest thinker of your age are but one small constituent
element. Imagine a secluded colonial settlement entirely
cut off from human civilization, and composed of Shake-
speares, Newtons, Darwins, with a few Nietzsches thrown
in ; you might expect in vain plays, Principia, Theories
of Evolution, or Transvaluations of all Values, to issue
thence.

That cogitative world, that world which constitutes
the largest bulk of our focal consciousness, of our ' cogito,'
is certainly of all aspects of our organism that which has
least claim to any individuality. It is a social product ;
the most superficial, extraneous, negociable, delusional,
gullible portion of our ' selves.' It is the material upon
which the public newspapers and every species of quack
operates contentedly, ' moulding public opinion.'

It is in spite of that malleable world of ' cogito,' of
third-brain concepts and thoughts that, coming to the

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 225

surface from the dark depths of unconsciousness and
inarticulate feeling, and bursting through its artificial
film in the form of honesties and realisms, our real
sense of individuality, of personality, asserts itself.

What is it exactly that you mean when you say that
you propose to affirm, to assert your individuality ? You,
in defiance of all conventionalities, ' taking-for-granted,'
and sheep-in-the-gap compliances, assert and liberate the
inmost impulses which truly actuate you. Surely not
all ? The police won't let you. Quite apart from the
police there are hosts of impulses within you which you
do not at all desire to affirm and assert, which, on the
contrary, you desire most carefully to conceal and stifle.
What you mean when you say that you are going to
assert yourself, your individuality, refers to a very carefully
selected sample of your individuality. The impulses that
desire to assert themselves do so not so much by virtue
of their strength as by virtue of their worth. Suppose
that you do succeed in ' imposing ' them how does that
come about ? By virtue precisely of that worth, of that
importance which impels you to impose them. That
self-same quality of your ' individuality ' which urges you
to impose it, persuades men to accept it. If that worth
be an illusion, you certainly will not succeed in imposing
your ' individuality ' in any degree at all. Is it then
your ' individuality ' which seeks to impose itself ? Not
that at all, but the higher grades and developments, the
freer manifestations, of the conative forces that are in
you. They impose themselves upon you, and, overflowing,
seek to impose themselves upon others likewise. That,
then, is the ' individuality ' which you deem worth asserting ;
not at all the promiscuous impulses, weaknesses, basenesses
and ignominies, and miscellaneous instincts that are in
you, but those which your evaluating impulse, your sense
of value and rank, your evolutionary sense, pronounces to
be worth asserting.

It is certainly not in the superficial world of our worded

15

226 PSYCHE'S LAMP

consciousness, but in those impulses and conative disposi-
tions which are the source of all our reactions, including
that consciousness itself, that we must look, if anywhere,
for the foundations of our individuality.

But those dispositions and impulses, we have already
sufficiently noted, have in their tendency, direction, and
operation, nothing to do with ' us.' It is quite impossible
to maintain that those forces which actuate us are directed
towards promoting our well-being, our ' happiness.' If
there is one clear mark of their general character, it is that
they are utterly unconcerned with promoting the welfare
of the individual. They absolutely disregard it. In no
sense can they be described as individualistic ; on the
contrary, they are characterized by the absolute ignoring
of the individual and his interests.

The higher we stand, the more self-development we
achieve, the more we ' assert our individuality,' the less
are our development and assertion individualistic. It is
only on the lower planes, as stunted, warped, arrested,
undeveloped, degenerate misbirths, that we can be
' individualistic/ that our activities can remain within
the sphere of self-preservation and search for ' happiness.'
The human soul does not seek happiness ; only the shop-
keeper soul does that.

All the impulses that actuate us and which rise at all
above the most primitive phase of nutrition or acquisition
are extra-individualistic. Not only do they transcend
individual interests, they are actually antagonistic to those
interests. It is as though they used the individual as
a mere tool, as a mere dupe ruthlessly employed in the
service of interests that are not his, drawn to his own
suffering and destruction by baits that make a fool of
him.

But that view, that mode of expression that we are
' used as tools ' by extraneous forces, by ' Nature ' is
not just or correct. For the simple reason that there is
no ' we ' : there is nothing in us over and above the urging

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 227

forces themselves. Those extra-individual, impersonal
forces that move us are ' we.' Any conflict arises only
between their more developed and their lower forms,
between the higher manifestations of those impulses and
the more imperfect ones of ' self-preservation ' which serve
the purpose of maintaining the individual form of life.

To the biologist, as is well known, the concept of
' individuality ' has been the source of not a few dilemmas
and difficulties. Among the Ccelenterates and Worms
the same organic form may at one time lead a separate
existence, be an individual, and at another be a part,,
or organ of a larger aggregate. Among the Siphonophorae
we have the curious spectacle of complete organisms,
built on quite different plans of specialization, which would
in ordinary circumstances be regarded as different species
or different stages in the life-history of a species, existing
in organic continuity as a bundle of disparate individuals.
Some of the individuals (?) are polyps, others medusae,
some are males, others females, some are palpatory
(dactylozooids), others seize prey ; yet all are connected
by a common stalk and all act in exact concert. Physalia,
for instance, which is such a bundle of diversified ' indivi-
duals ' which swims in the Mediterranean, accelerates or
slows its swimming movements (or rather those of its
medusae 'individuals'), changes its course, turns, dives and
plunges, or rises to the surface exactly as if it were a
single ' individual.' On the view expressed in the present
work the puzzle is elucidated by the fact that where
there is organic continuity there is equilibration of all
conative tendencies of the organism, no matter how
differentiated ; and therefore the anomalous bunch of
diverse and disparate organisms, although it has no
' nervous system,' acts precisely as if it were an orthodoxly
organized ' individual,' and is in fact an individual.
Biological individuality is merely a question of organic
continuity, and any agglutinated assemblage of organized
living matter can be an ' individual ' provided it can manage

228 PSYCHE'S LAMP

to support its life. Any hydroid polyp can be cut with a
knife into as many ' individuals ' as you may choose, and
each fragment will regenerate missing parts and restore
itself to the form and organization of a complete polyp.
That holds true of plants and of any organism where the
specialization of function is not too great ; for the greater
that specialization, the less, naturally, is the power of
further differentiation, that is, of regeneration and repro-
duction. Therefore to be capable of reproduction a cell
must be functionally undifferentiated. The same, indeed,
is strictly true of all organisms, including man. An
undifferentiated detached cell spermatozoon or ovum
leads a separate existence when disjoined from the parent
individual and constitutes the starting-point of a new
individual life. In a biological sense the concept ' in-
dividual ' is of quite secondary significance a matter
of subdivision and physical continuity. Individuality
can be produced by means of scissors. The ' indivi-
dual ' organism is merely a detached part of another
organism.

And, properly speaking, our own sense, feeling, and
persuasion of our individuality rests upon that same
crude accident of organic discontinuity ; it means that
we have no feelings but those of our detached, delimitated
organism, and that all the feelings of that quantity of living
stuff are ' our ' feelings. Our ' individuality ' is a share,
a measured portion, or slice of the thing, Life. But to
regard that slice as something having a fundamental and
substantive in-itselfness is plainly the merest inaccuracy.
The mere circumstance of its acquired spacial discon-
tinuity is wholly insignificant beside the fact of the actual
continuity of its being with the whole of which it is a
part. The substantive thing, the actual fact, is not the
' individual/ but Life. It is only as a part of that con-
tinuous whole that we, as individuals, exist.

And not of Life only. We must believe those of us to
whom the word- juggles and deus-ex-machina contrivances

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 229

of a superadded ' creation ' are unworthy and unmeaning
subterfuges that the stream of Life had its source
in the inorganic world. That stream is, as a verifiable
fact, a form, a configuration of the same forces ; it is
physically and chemically analysable into the self-same
constituents, which it is continually drawing upon and
incorporating, and into which it continually reverts. The
' energy ' which is the quantitative measure of its activities
is that of the chemical disruption of its molecular systems,
that of the combustion of the fuels it consumes, that,
ultimately, of the sun. You are, quantitatively regarded,
a measured portion of energy which can issue into the
displacement of weights by your muscles, the composition
of poetry, an act of heroism, or into as much heat as
will boil a pot of water. The qualitative differences are
manifestations of differences in form, in complexity of
configuration. And we can follow in the diversities of
configuration in the organic world the waxing tendencies
towards that complexity of structural disposition con-
tinuously approaching towards those conditions of self-
renewal which render the repetition of reaction and its
consequent modification possible, that adaptive modifi-
cation which is the physical counterpart of feeling.

That continuity is apprehensible ; no discontinuity,
when we proceed beyond the surface of phenomena, is
anywhere discernible. Our dissection of the world into
separated and discreet ' objects ' is a purely utilitarian
manipulation of our cognition ; an ' object ' is merely
such for the convenience of operation of our acts and
thoughts upon it ; it is an aspect of our activity. We
regard the solar system, or the Earth, or a continent,
or a mountain, or a stone on that mountain, or an atom
in that stone, each as an ' object,' according to our need.
Our distinctions and relations are the pattern of our uses
which we stamp upon the face of unity. The forms of
our spacial demarcations are entirely functional ; they have
no structural reality. Our ' atom/ for instance, only exists

230 PSYCHE'S LAMP

by virtue of its effects upon every other atom in the
universe, and is itself but the resultant in a given point
of view, of all the forces in the universe. The atom and
the universe are not separable entities ; our distinction
between the one and the other is but an abstractional
manipulation.

The same holds good of our distinction between ' us '
and the universe as of all our other distinctions. It is
merely contingent on the disposition of our activities, the
particular mode of their operation in our consciousness ;
it is functional. Those activities and that consciousness
are just as much the resultant of the whole universe as
the activities of the atom. The spatial differentiation
between what is inside and what is outside our skin no
longer holds in pure thought : the Little World of our
elaborated feeling contains the whole of the Big World ;
and the Macrocosm which contains the Microcosm is in
turn contained within the Microcosm. Our distinctions,
demarcations, and relations are here reduced to a juggle
of inapplicable categories.

Conception of the Whole, far less ' knowledge,' is not
possible ; since all our concepts are of distinctions and
comparisons, and the Whole cannot be compared with its
parts or with anything else.

A ' scientific conception of the universe ' is an absurdity
which is no longer seriously to be broken on the wheel.
A scheme in terms of ' matter and motion ' can never be
anything else than a mathematical symbol representing
our possible molar movements, and can no more ' represent '
the universe than an architect's plans can shelter us from
the weather, or the chemical formula of a carbohydrate
appease our hunger. If with an ideal completeness of
knowledge, infinitely fuller than our present knowledge,
we knew the structure and configuration of the whole
universe from the remotest ether-wave to the anatomy of
the last atom, we should be scarcely a step more advanced
than we are now in our qualitative knowledge of the uni-

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 231

verse. All that such a symbolic scheme would offer to
our contemplation would be a chart of our possible action.
Not to elaborate the obvious does anyone making any
claim to common-sense imagine, for instance, that the
universe is constructed in view of the range of our
telescopic instruments ? If their optical field were the
interior of a dewdrop on some gigantic petal, would our
science be able to have any suspicion of it ?

Our psychology is no more applicable to the universe
than our dynamics. When we have said that the
universe is a ' Universal Mind,' what, in fine, does that
signify ? It is obvious that thought, sensation, concepts,
all forms of cognitive processes whatsoever, which con-
stitute the bulk of our own ' mind,' are wholly inattributable
to a Universal Mind ; since there is, ex vi termini, nothing
outside it to sense or cognize. Thoughts, cognitions, are
in our psychology, merely means of giving effect to our
impulses, and therefore quite inapplicable to a Universal
Mind. Feeling, we have seen, is not attributable to
inorganic reactions, since it is the concomitant of
modification of reactions, and inorganic reactions can
never be modified, for they can never be repeated by
the same system. This, it is true, applies only to
reactions taken singly and theoretically isolated from the
rest of the universe ; and accordingly does not apply
to the universe as a whole. But feeling is, like cognition,
but a guide to external relations, and therefore meaning-
less where there are none.

If we have the most elementary understanding of what
is meant in our psychology by ' purpose,' can we attach
any meaning to the question, ' What is the purpose of
the universe ? ' A purpose is with us but a means of
steering amid the choice of ways ; it belongs, as much
as our cognition and our thought, to the instruments and
methods employed in the narrow conditions of our specific
activity. It is the distinctive characteristic of all the
reactions of the inorganic universe that no trace of ' purpose'

282 PSYCHE'S LAMP

is ever discoverable in any of them. But when we are
led by the argument from complete absence of design
in nature to call the universe ' purposeless ' our predicate
is as meaningless and inapplicable as our demand for
a ' purpose.' The tendency, the direction which every
activity implies, wholly transcends our category of finality.

The application of those terms to the universe does
not assist us in assimilating it to our psychological
experience. Neither from our physical nor from our
psychological forms can we derive any concept of the
universe.

Far less than either are our ethical values applicable.
These are the effect of circumstances and relations alto-
gether peculiar to human development, and are therefore
even more limited in their application than the forms of
our experience. They cease to have any meaning beyond
the sphere of those social activities and relations which
are the medium of human evolution. If they were, as
has been so persistently imagined, applicable to the
universe we should be under the necessity of regarding
it as the . manifestation of an infinitely malignant power.
From the moment that we attempt to transfer those values
to the universe we behold it as a nightmare of callous
and refined cruelty. On its brow is written, as on that
of the Spirit of Evil, that it ' never loved any soul.' J
The beauty, grandeur, majesty of the aspects of the
universe we hardly need a psychologist to tell us are
not, like artistic values, expressions of qualities in the
creative forces that produce them, but of our own moods
and affections. That majestic cloud vision is ready to
strike us dead ; those calm snow-peaks that exalt our
spirit are ready to dash us to pieces and to bury
us in their avalanches with as much indifference as

1 Man sieht, dass er an nichts keinen Anteil nimmt,
Es steht ihm an der Stirn geschrieben,
Dass er nicht mag eine Seele lieben.

Faust.

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 233

they would the boulders of their moraines ; that siren
isle-studded southern bay that thrills us with its in-
toxicating loveliness is a death-trap which swallows up
entire populations in its earthquakes and overwhelms
whole cities under its streams of fire ; that sea is the
emblem of treacherous inconceivable cruelty. Hear what
a seaman, a great poet and lover of the sea, has to
say of that aspect of Nature which may fairly be taken
as representative of her grandeur and majestic power :
" He man or people who, putting his trust in the
friendship of the sea, neglects the strength and cunning of
his right hand, is a fool ! As if it were too great, too
mighty for common virtue, the ocean has no compassion,
no faith, no law, no memory. Impenetrable and heartless,
the sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its
precarious favours. The sea the truth must be con-
fessed has no generosity. The most amazing wonder of
the deep is its unfathomable cruelty." He goes on to
relate the rescue of the survivors from a water-logged
ship one morning when " the peace of the enchanting
forenoon was so profound, so untroubled that it seemed
that every word pronounced loudly on deck would penetrate
to the very heart of the infinite mystery born of the con-
junction of water and sky. On that exquisite day of
gently breathing peace and veiled sunshine perished my
romantic love to what men's imagination had proclaimed
the most august aspect of Nature. The cynical indifference
of the sea to the merits of human suffering and courage
revolted me. And I looked upon the true sea the sea
that plays with men till their hearts are broken, and wears
stout ships to death. To love it is not well. It knows
no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to
long companionship, to long devotion." x

But to ascribe cruelty, callousness, malignity, to the
universe is, of course, a misconception as absurd as to
ascribe to it ' love,' ' goodness,' ' compassion.' The one
1 Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea.

234 PSYCHE'S LAMP

set of values is as inapplicable as is the other ; for
they are values of our social-commerce morality, of our
inter-individual morality, and have nothing to do with
our relation to the universe or its relation to us. To apply
those values to the universe leads us, like all absurdities
of thought, into an antinomy : If the universe be
evil, how come we, who are issued from it, to judge it
to be evil ? If the universe were the handiwork of
a malignant God, we should have to forgive God for
Man's sake.

The morality which is entirely absent from the universe
is the individual-morality, the respect of persons, the love,
kindness, compassion, justice, the morality which has
reference to the relations between individuals. Of that
the universe shows no trace or symptom ; is it to be
expected that the adjustments called for by the con-
tingencies arising out of the constitution of a very special
and peculiar form of organism, the social organism, should
be ' universal laws ' ?

The inapplicability of that morality to the universe
nowise excludes a ' morality ' from the universe. ' Indi-
vidual-morality/ which is merely a contingent adaptation
a means again is not at all our highest morality. Our
evolutionary conscience, our intuition of values, is not
greatly concerned with individual welfare ours or others' ;
it is, in fact, as we have seen, extra-individualistic, im-
personal. It refers to quite other values than those of
' individual-morality ' ; it is as cruel and unscrupulous as
the universe. And the universal order does, as a matter
of fact, take account of, and very ruthlessly punishes,
evolutionary crimes and delinquencies inadaptations,
unveracities, unpardonable sins against the laws of the
development and growth of Life. Though it does so in
a quite extra-individual manner, punishing ' innocent '
and ' guilty ' alike, to the third and fourth generation,
after the fashion of a Hebrew God. The ethics of the
universe according to those higher and real values is

THE ILLUSION OF INDIVIDUALITY 235

quite another matter than the absurd application to it
of the ethical values of our social adjustments.

We are concerned with the individual, and the universe
is not. We are concerned with individual values, with
the individual's fate ; the universe absolutely ignores
everything individual. That, properly speaking, is the
root of our misunderstanding of the universe. And that
' individuality ' upon which we base our strife-born,
power-thought-originated conceptions, is an illusion. That
which constitutes the actual worth of our ' individuality '
consists wholly in its extra-individual, impersonal mani-
festations. That wherein it is individual-regarding con-
stitutes the baseness and lower values of its operation.
' Self-preservation ' is the baser instinct necessitated by
the use of the individual life as an instrument of impersonal
conations. It is a necessary evil, which in all vital and
high development is subjugated and suppressed. We call
that heroic which sets aside self-preservation. And, with
amazing inconsistency, we our theological sentiments
rather actually have the assurance to suggest that our
' desire for immortality,' that is to say, our expanded
instinct for self-preservation, is something noble ' Derives
it not from what we have the likest God within the soul ? '
The desire for eternal self-preservation derives from what
we have the likest a terror-stricken rabbit within the
soul. The eternal self-preservation of our ' individuality '
would, when we come to consider it, be a somewhat
appalling outlook. The eternal self-preservation of our
grocer, our charwoman, and our friend the curate is
obviously a prospect to make us weep. Most of the
ingredients of our ' individuality ' are things of which the
eternal self-preservation is not at all desirable, is, on
the contrary, highly undesirable.

As for the realities of our ' individuality,' the actual
active principles and springs of them, their primnm mobile,
those need no ' self-preservation ' : they are of their
nature eternal. They do not pertain to our misconception

236 PSYCHE'S LAMP

of individuality, they are extra-individual, they are
impersonal ; and our distinctions between ' individuals,'
between self and not-self, are in the sphere of those
realities devoid of meaning and application.

To ' cognize ' the universe is not at all an imperative
requisite. All that our cognition can avail us and that
is no light service is to restrain us from belittling and
desecrating it with the dishonesties of our inapplicable
concepts. It is incomputably greater.

What is needful to us is not to cognize the universe,
but to know that we can trust it and to rejoice in
it. That is the Tritmg, the faith that is needful. And
is it not established by the fact that the forces that
move it and those which actuate us are identical ?

POSTSCRIPT

FIRST AID TO CRITICS

NINE hundred and ninety-nine criticisms out of a thousand
on any philosophical evaluation of life proceed from what
are currently, and erroneously, accounted two opposed moods,
temperaments, or points of view the rationalistic and the
sentimental. There must always be something false in every
reply returned from either station to objections advanced
from the other, as there must always be something false in
the objection ; for the very assumption of the opposed positions
is itself a failure to grasp the most elementary and simple
relations of the psychological mechanism. It is a manifes-
tation, not of ' temperaments,' but of psychological ignorance.
Intellectual processes are ' only ' instruments of feeling, but
every higher human sentiment has for its object a con-
struction of the intellectual instrument. Hence is every
exaltation of human feeling the whole worth of man made
possible only by that instrument. Even religion rests upon
' evidences,' or, as they were called in lower stages of rational
development, ' signs.' Man would have no high sentiments
if he had no intellect. To oppose the two is nonsense ; and
the only conflict between them is that which I have referred
to as the conflict of motives involved in all cognition.

As every product of intellect is true or false, that is to say,
produced in the undeflected discharge of its adaptive function
or in the perversion of that function when corrupted to bear
false and ' agreeable ' testimony, so sentiments are true or
false according as their objects are legitimate or illegitimate
products of the intellect.

The vice of thought called intellectualism or rationalism
does not consist in abuse of, or in undue reliance on, the
instrument, but in the psychological blunder of mistaking
the products of the intellect for an end-in-themselves as,

237

238 PSYCHE'S LAMP

for instance, in the Platonic Theory of Ideas or the ' scientific '
schemes of the universe instead of recognizing those products
for what they psychologically are, objects of sentiment.

The radical, pernicious and fatal misuse of the instruments
of cognition, on the other hand, is called mysticism. Mysticism
consists in dishonestly filling in the blank cheque offered by
a ' mystery.' There are no mysteries in the sense of blank
cheques which we are at liberty to fill in. Every such opera-
tion is an intellectual felony. A mystery is a problem that
we have not solved, a question to which we have no answer.
If that blank in our apprehension is filled in, it ceases to be
a blank. But the cheque is invalid ; it is not a legitimate
cognitive value, but a forgery. It is a lie, and will sooner
or later inevitably get us into appalling trouble.

When the sentimentalist (I am, of course, using the word
with no depreciatory connotation) appeals to feeling against
the rationalist, the latter retorts, ' Feeling is no instrument
of cognition.' When the rationalist appeals to intellect
against the sentimentalist, the latter retorts, ' Intellect is
but an instrument ; Gefiihl ist alles.' Both are right in their
retorts ; and both are wrong in the psychological confusion
that constitutes their respective attitudes. The sentimentalist
who of a product of thought says, ' I feel differently/ is as
irrelevant as the mathematician who of a symphony asks,
' What does it prove ? '

The conclusions contained in my last chapter, towards
which those of all previous ones converge, will call forth from
readers of the most diverse shades of opinion protests at
varying heats of indignation. Those conclusions are a challenge
to the most fundamental of all notions, to the foundation of
all past and current thought and evaluations of life's values,
the notion of individuality, the ' sum ' that was once regarded
as the one solid rock of certainty amid a universe of uncer-
tainties. Berkeley dissolved the ' external world ' of the
thinker ; I call in question the existence of the thinker himself.

The question raised has, like all others, an intellectual
and a sentimental aspect ; but the latter must be kept severely
distinct from the former. To approach the problem with
the formula ' Individuality is a mystery ' is to suborn the
competent court and from the outset to prejudice the issue.

The ' mystery ' let us say rather the problem consists
in the double-sided fact that there is an obvious delimitation
and segregation constituting the individual, while the delimi-

POSTSCRIPT 239

tating frontiers are no less obviously encroached upon by
the individual's history, and by every one of his ' relations '
actual or cognitive to his '-environment.' The old puzzle
of ' Knowledge ' ' How can a thing be known that is not
part of the knower ? ' is but one among the violations of
the frontiers of individuality. I go much farther that
delimitation and self-containedness melt utterly away under
examination. The thinker who claims to point to the essential
is entitled to the credit of not overlooking the obvious. To
thrust the obvious upon him as an objection is the mode of
procedure which was wont to elicit from Nietzsche ' Notes
for donkeys.' Far from ignoring the obvious aspects of
delimitation and segregation which constitute individuality
(' in a sense '), I have, I believe, supplied, in the concep-
tions advanced of organic and inorganic differences, of the
mechanism of feeling, of organic as equivalent to psycho-
logical continuity, if not an ' explanation,' at least a mode
of conceiving the delimitation in terms of other knowledge
which, after all, is the most that any ' explanation ' can
do. But that segregation is, admittedly, only one aspect
of the ' mystery ' of individuality, which were else no
' mystery.' My challenge does not consist in denying that
qualified and limited aspect, but in affirming that when erected
into the essential aspect of individuality it is superficial and
supremely misleading. But when that superficial and mis-
leading aspect is further promoted to the status of absolute
prototype of ' existence,' it is no longer a merely misleading
error of proportion, but a rank and utter falsehood. There
needs no probing of the concept of ' existence ' to condemn
as fantastic its application to a phenomenon which lasts some
threescore years and ten. That is not an existence, but an
event ; it is not, it happens. Not only is that segregation
but an ' aspect ' of individuality, qualified and contra-
dicted by the ubiquitous encroachments of the ' external
world ' ; the individual consists wholly of those ' encroaching '
forces, and, those abstracted, nothing is left. Historically
and actually the individual is a locus of actuating impulses
which are not limited in time or extension, and which operate
without reference to the individual.

It is with the intellectual product that I have been chiefly
concerned, and not with the development of its sentimental
consequences. I hold, perhaps unwisely, that a thinker
should not do all the thinking for his reader ; if the latter is
unable or too lazy to do his share and to develop the proffered

240 PSYCHE'S LAMP

indications, he is scarcely worth the trouble of fuller explicit-
ness. Were I a pragmatist, I should preconise my conclusions
on the strength of their affective fruits. The stupendous
ascription of substantial existence to the event of individual
segregation has been the root of all thought and all religions.
What are the fruits ? Dead-sea fruits that have turned the
glow of life to dust and ashes, universal mistrust of know-
ledge, mistrust of all values, mistrust of Life, mistrust of the
Universe, the blight of arid futility. It is scarcely an exaggera-
tion to say that the concept of individuality has plunged the
world into despair. The apprehension of the truth that
individual differentiation is but a superficial and misleading
appearance, while the essential fact of existence is, on the
contrary, the continuity and impersonal unity of all the forces
that represent the substance of being, is the solution of all the
problems of sentiment. It invests the values, high, low, base,
noble, good and evil, with a meaning. It abolishes the conflict
of the individual with an autocratic or patriarchal universe.
It robs the conflict of egoism of its polluting obsession. It
abolishes the problem of evil ; for the evil against which all
existence struggles is its own past, which, being dynamic, it
must surpass. It abolishes death, for what does not exist
cannot cease to exist, and what is universal cannot die. The
infirmities, disabilities and imbecilities that flesh is heir to
are the limitations which constitute the pretext for the illusion
of individuality ; what we prize in individuality is that which
transcends those limitations. What is personal in the indi-
vidual is base, what is of value is impersonal. The perception
of human impersonality is the sign by which man may yet
win. It is the giver of that trust and strength, that power
and confidence, that fortitude and peace, which thoughts and
religions founded on the illusion of individuality have shown
that they cannot give.

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